High Museum of Art
13.06 - 16.11.2025

‘Ezrom Legae: Beasts’ at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, is the first major museum exhibition in the United States for celebrated South African artist Ezrom Legae (1938–1999). 

During apartheid, many artists contended with its corresponding oppression and bodily violence by presenting the human figure in animal form or abstracting it. The exhibition focuses on Legae’s bestial compositions, featuring more than thirty drawings of contorted and anguished creatures, imaginative studies and explorations of form and metaphors articulating the artist’s political consciousness. 

The exhibition features drawings from 1967 to 1996, foregrounding the 1970s and 1990s, groundbreaking periods in South African political history. Amid mounting unrest and anti-apartheid protests in the 1970s, such as the Soweto uprisings, activists and civilians endured increased violence, exile, and imprisonment, often without trial and including solitary confinement. This period is considered Legae’s most prolific, in which he produced pencil, ink, and charcoal depictions of animals as covert representations of apartheid’s players and impact. The artist produced substantially less until the 1990s, when he reemerged during South Africa’s political transition with drawings addressing the end of apartheid and lingering concerns regarding racism and poverty. 

Legae’s beasts exemplify the ways artists use coded visual languages to subvert and endure tyranny.

Ezrom Legae (South African, 1938–1999), Horse, four stages of dying, 1967, pencil and charcoal on paper, Dr. Gavin Watkins, Private Collection, Sydney, Australia.