Italian-born and naturalised in South Africa after being held here as a prisoner of war, Edoardo Villa became, like Skotnes, a crucial “adjacent” figure in Black Modernism – a white sculptor whose studio, teaching, and presence at Polly Street and within the Amadlozi group helped open space for Kumalo, Legae and others to forge an African-led modernism in three dimensions. The three late steel works gathered here – the compact, biomorphic Smoley (1987), the attenuated totem of Fi (1992) and the unique African Throne I (1993) – show how fully he had absorbed and reimagined those conversations by the end of apartheid. Welded from industrial plate rather than modelled in clay, Villa’s figures are at once bodies, masks, and machines: heads become shields, limbs become brackets or supports, thrones hover between seat and spirit-house. Their titles suggest intimacy, sound, sovereignty; their forms imply guardianship and watchfulness at the threshold of South Africa’s democratic transition. In the context of this exhibition, these sculptures mark a vital, if complicated, strand in the story: a European-trained artist who refused the primitivist distance of his peers and instead let African sculptural logics remake his own practice. The result is a family of steel beings that echo the spiritual charge of Kumalo’s bronzes and Sibiya’s carved panels while insisting that modernism in this place was always a shared, negotiated project – one in which questions of power, protection, and who gets to occupy the “throne” remain fiercely alive.