This intimate charcoal portrait of Ezrom Legae, drawn by his contemporary Ben Arnold, is a rare, direct image of one of South African art history’s key sculptors and draughtsmen. Rather than monumentalising Legae as a heroic figure, Arnold presents him in a moment of quiet inwardness: eyes lowered, features gently modelled, seemingly caught in deep thought. The spareness of the line and the warm tonality of the paper echo Legae’s own preference for economical mark-making in his drawings, suggesting an aesthetic kinship between artist and subject.

Within the exhibition, this portrait functions as a kind of prologue: a humanising counterpoint to the more traumatised, dismembered bodies that appear elsewhere, and a reminder that behind the icons of “Black Modernism” were individuals navigating complex personal and political terrains. The drawing also points to the collaborative, conversational nature of South Africa’s art communities in the 1960s and 1970s, where artists frequently sketched one another as a way of thinking through questions of identity, influence, and mutual regard.