In the following collection of six pastel and charcoal drawings, Kumalo turns to paper as a speculative space in which to test how a Black, spiritually inflected modernism might respond to the violent, transitional politics of early-1980s South Africa. In the two blue studies, he imagines figures that seem to hover between earth and sky, registering the atmosphere in which Black South Africans were negotiating the aftermath of Soweto and the tightening states of emergency. Their looping, bound forms suggest bodies carrying burdens, but also beings in the process of becoming – visualisations of spiritual resilience at a time when formal politics was increasingly surveilled and criminalised. The single brown, mask-like drawing condenses these pressures into a charged emblem: it can be read as the face of authority, the ancestral witness, and the collective “we” of the community all at once. Emerging from his Amadlozi engagement, it holds together the fraught questions of who speaks for whom, and how African spiritual lineages might stand against the dehumanising masks of apartheid bureaucracy. The three wall-relief designs push these ideas outward into architectural space, effectively proposing another kind of public monument for a cityscape still dominated by colonial and nationalist symbols. Conceived while Black gatherings, murals and slogans were being policed, these works imagine walls animated not by state propaganda but by a procession of guardians, elders and shape-shifters. Taken together, the six drawings map a late-career moment in which Kumalo uses abstraction to think through sovereignty, spiritual protection and the occupation of space – rehearsing, on paper, a decolonised visual order that the politics of his time could barely yet allow.

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This 1982 drawing is a late and poignant example of Kumalo’s continuing dialogue with spiritual symbolism, femininity, and transformation. The composition is anchored by the stylised female form, rendered with rhythmic, curvilinear contours that echo the structural volumes of his bronzes. The inclusion of the bird balanced on the figure’s head enriches the work with layered meaning: in African cosmology, the bird often functions as a messenger between earthly and ancestral realms, an emblem of transcendence, flight, and the continuity of life.

The work belongs to a group of drawings produced in Kumalo’s final decade, when he increasingly turned to works on paper as both autonomous statements and preparatory studies for sculpture. These pieces reveal how, by the 1980s, Kumalo’s aesthetic had shifted toward greater abstraction while retaining symbolic depth rooted in Zulu and broader African traditions.

The image resonates with themes central to Kumalo’s oeuvre: the dignity of the human figure, the relationship between humanity and the spiritual world, and the transformative energy of ritual gesture. The female form – often a vessel of fertility and continuity in his sculpture – here assumes an almost totemic posture, her gesture amplifying the upward thrust of the bird.

The chromatic choice of blue pastel imbues the drawing with atmospheric calm, evoking a celestial or transcendent dimension. The bird itself, poised yet dynamic, suggests release and liberation, reinforcing Kumalo’s vision of art as a site where physical form and spiritual essence meet.

Kumalo’s practice emerged from the influential Polly Street Art Centre and Amadlozi Group, where he and contemporaries like Ezrom Legae forged a distinctly modernist idiom rooted in African cultural forms. His mentor Egon Guenther encouraged synthesis between African sculptural archetypes and European modernism (especially Henry Moore and Marino Marini).

Woman Holding Bird over Head epitomises this synthesis. Its abstraction, frontal symmetry, and stylised anatomy align it with international modernism, yet its symbolic weight – the figure as mediator between human and spiritual worlds – anchors it within African cosmology. This duality placed Kumalo within global currents of postcolonial modernism, where artists across the Global South sought to reconcile local tradition with international form. Thematically, the bird motif aligns Kumalo with contemporaries like Dumile Feni, whose drawings also employed avian imagery as metaphors for freedom, exile, and transcendence.

Woman Holding Bird over Head is a distilled statement of Kumalo’s late style: sculptural in its volumes, symbolic in its imagery, and profoundly spiritual in its resonance. As a drawing from the artist’s final decade, it encapsulates his mature synthesis of African and modernist visual languages, while affirming the enduring relevance of his work in discussions of African modernism and transnational art history.