This 1982 drawing is a striking example of Kumalo’s late-career preoccupation with form, rhythm, and symbolic presence. Conceived as a study for a sculptural work, its interlocking volumes and organic geometry testify to the artist’s mature style, where abstraction and symbolism coalesced into a uniquely African modernist vocabulary.

Executed in charcoal with areas of pastel tonality, the drawing places heavy emphasis on linear structure and massing. Its repetition of rounded forms, coupled with spherical elements at the base, evokes the physicality of carved or cast sculpture. The blue ground, as with other drawings from this period, adds a celestial or spiritual register, situating the figure within a liminal, atmospheric space.

The composition suggests a tightly composed, almost totemic presence. The looping, bound forms imply strength contained within restraint, and the spherical motifs may be read as symbols of fertility, continuity, or generative force – recurring themes across Kumalo’s sculptural oeuvre.

Rather than being merely preparatory, this work should be seen as an autonomous exploration of sculptural essence. It reveals Kumalo’s capacity to translate the materiality of bronze into the two-dimensional medium of drawing, where line and shading mimic the weight, shadow, and tactility of cast metal.

Kumalo’s practice consistently engaged with themes of human dignity, spiritual mediation, and ancestral continuity. As a member of the Amadlozi Group under Egon Guenther’s patronage, he absorbed modernist principles of simplification and formal reduction, while drawing on African sculptural archetypes – masks, fertility figures, and totemic guardians.

By 1982, his work had entered a phase of abstraction in which figuration was increasingly compressed into symbolic geometry. This drawing exemplifies that late development: the human figure is not overtly depicted, but its essence persists in the rhythmic interplay of volume and void. In this respect, Kumalo’s work paralleled contemporaries such as Ezrom Legae, whose late drawings similarly fused body, symbol, and abstraction, as well as international modernists like Henry Moore, whose treatment of form and void resonated strongly with Kumalo’s approach.

Scholars have noted that Kumalo’s drawings of the 1980s are vital in understanding his artistic development, not as secondary to sculpture but as parallel meditations on form, rhythm, and symbolic charge.

Untitled (Study for sculpture I) is a deeply resonant late drawing by Sydney Kumalo, encapsulating his mature synthesis of African spirituality and modernist abstraction. Both preparatory and complete, it bridges media and meaning, offering a rare glimpse into the artist’s thought process at a moment when his visual language was at its most distilled and potent.