Ezrom Legae: Beasts, on view at the High Museum through November 16, marks the late South African artist’s first solo U.S. museum exhibition. Featuring 40 drawings and two sculptures, the show lands with quiet power, like a heavy stone in still water.
The power here comes not from monumentality but rather from intimacy. Graphite and charcoal shapes take the forms of bulls, chickens, horses, goats and dogs — the beasts of the title — their bodies often twisted in travail, labor, death or decay. Organs and sinews, sometimes difficult to distinguish, emerge in lines and shading. The effect is at once visceral (we often literally see viscera) and restrained. Legae, who once said he preferred drawing to speaking, embedded quiet resistance into his work through spare marks that evoke a world both profound and sacred.
