Frisky fight
Every time I walk through the garden of the University of Pretoria I see the artwork Reclining Figure III by Edoardo Daniele Villa.
I see the curved gun barrels and the battle shields. They lie on top of each other as if they are playing.
In my mind I also hear the elders talking about the sorrow of lost friends. It is much better to have a frisky fight with each other when there is a difference of opinion than to go to war.
Edoardo Daniele Villa means a lot to the African community. He knows the stories and has an exceptionally great creative talent to convert concrete experiences into an abstract artwork.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Robbertje vechten
Steeds als ik door de tuin loop van de Universiteit van Pretoria zie ik het kunstwerk Reclining Figure III van Edoardo Daniele Villa.
Dan zie ik de gebogen geweerslopen en de gevechtsschilden. Ze liggen over elkaar heen of zij aan het spelen zijn.
In gedachten hoor ik ook weer de oudsten vertellen over het verdriet van de verloren vrienden. Het is veel beter om met elkaar een robbertje te vechten bij een meningsverschil, dan om oorlog te voeren.
Edoardo Daniele Villa betekent veel voor de Afrikaanse gemeenschap. Hij kent de verhalen en heeft een bijzonder groot creatief talent om concrete ervaringen om te zetten in een abstract kunstwerk.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com.
www.artsdot.com:
A sculpture, titled, Reclining Figure is a painted steel work by the Italian-born South African artist, Edoardo Villa (1915-2011).The work is a stylized artillery cannon but also a figure trying to stand upright. Several reclining figures were created by Villa as part of his war series symbolic of a damaged cannon and a wounded soldier. Villa was the captain of an artillery contingent in North Africa during the Second World War. His placement was overrun by the British at 9 December 1941, during a reconnaissance mission by the Allied forces just before the Battle of Sidi Barrani. He was wounded and spent some time in Egypt recuperating from his injuries.Later in that year, Villa was shipped, with thousands of other prisoners of war (POW), to South Africa where he was interned at Zonderwater, a prison camp near Pretoria, just outside the town of Cullinan. The work was donated by Villa in 1990 to the University of Pretoria. The University of Pretoria has one of the most extensive Villa collections of this notable South African sculptor, born in Italy. Villa worked primarily in steel and bronze and his works is abstract art and cubist. Short Biography: Edoardo Daniele Villa was born in 31 May 1915 in Bergamo, Italy. Here he studied at the Andrea Fortini Art School under Minotti, Barbieri and Lodi, his studies brought home to cities like Milan and Rome. In 1939 Edoardo Villa was conscripted into the Italian Army and wounded in Egypt at the battle of Sidi Barrani during the Second World War in 1940. Villa was taken prisoner and was subsequently brought to South Africa as a prisoner of war and interned at the Zonderwater Prisoner of War (POW) Camp near Pretoria. Villa was released in 1947 and remained in South Africa where he practised his art as a sculptor. Villa adopted his new country and became one of the most noted and accomplished abstract sculptors of his time. In 1965, Villa married Claire Zafeirakou who was his companion until she passed away in November 2010. Edoardo Villa lived in Johannesburg until his death on 1 May 2011.
www.theviewingroom.co.za:
Unlike most of his fellow prisoners, Villa decided to stay in South Africa on his release in 1947, settling in Johannesburg. He went on to become the foremost abstract sculptor in South Africa - rejecting traditional European art practices and mimetic sculpture that defined the South African scene in the 1950s. Villa started to explore an African character in his work, bringing in elements of the highveld landscape; its plant forms, brilliant sun, dramatic shadows and rock formations - manifested in sharp contours and intersecting flat and curved planes (Berman, 2005). In the early 1950s, Villa s friend Douglas Portway recommended he experiment with constructing sculptures by welding pieces of metal together after Picasso and Gonzales had begun working in this medium. At the start of the 1950s, Villa toured Italy with fellow Italian-born artist Giuseppe Cattaneo. In South Africa, he started a new trend that he would continue throughout his career, holding open-air exhibitions in Joubert Park, in Johannesburg (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005).
Villa s use of Cubist and Constructivist techniques and his creative use of steel, exploring the possibilities of bent and welded metal, characterised his break with descriptive conventions (Berman, 2005: 4). In line with Cubism, he became interested in traditional African sculpture, and a new formal language that appreciated the geometric forms in much African sculpture (Maurice and Dodd, 2009). During the 1960 s, Villa s work engaged in a dialogue between constructed steel and sculpture modeled for casting (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005: 48).
Another significant development in Villa s career was when he met Lucas Legodi in 1964, and the two began a long-standing friendship and co-operation, working together on large sculptures. The two were able to produce more prolifically, accelerating Villa s development, as works could be completed much quicker. Rather than working on an individual sculpture, Villa often worked on a series of works in which a formal idea was explored for possible variations of form and meaning (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005).
Villa was passionately dedicated to the creation of an African identity in his work an aim which was initiated and further explored through his friendship with two collectors of modern and African art, Egon Guenther and Vittorini Meneghelli. He became a member of the Amadlozi group, along with Cecil Skotnes, Sydney Kumalo, Giuseppe Cattaneo and Cecily Sash. In 1963, Egon Guenther organised an exhibition for the Amadlozi group around different cities in Italy, showing their work in Rome, Venice, Milan and Florence.
According to Esm Berman, his work began to speak convincingly, not of the appearance, but of the experience of Africa . This is most noticeable in his works of a more serious nature, such as Confrontation of 1978, which illustrates Villa s concern with the human dynamics of the political conflict after the Soweto student uprising in 1976. It is not difficult to see this work as encapsulating all the pain, defiance and anger arising from the implacable conflict of values that hallmarked the uprisings of 1976 , write Von Maltitz and Nel.
Close to seven decades of Villa s career has seen his work undergo remarkable stylistic transformations. Figurative, descriptive heads, busts and reliefs gave way to the stylized abstraction of modernist shapes inspired by the African landscape, and finally to the colourful works of structural abstraction which typify the latter part of his oeuvre. During the 1980 s, Villa completed a large number of public commissions, in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban and Johannesburg, experimenting with different sculptural forms and techniques. His largest exhibition, Villa at 80 , was held in Johannesburg in 1995, with nearly 300 works on display. Following the successful exhibition, articles were frequently published on Villa s work, in both South Africa and Italy, emphasising Villa s impact on the development of South African art.
In the 1980s he repeatedly returned to using pipes in his works, which he had begun in the 1970s, as well as the incorporation of colour into his sculptures. As noted by Von Maltitz and Nel, Colour, for Villa, has always been an important means of amplifying the mood he intends the work to project at times brooding, moody and aggressive; at others, light-hearted and joyous. He also completed a number of small steel works, and a series of sculptures such as Metamorphosis , in which organic shapes predominate. Since, 1990 he has produced a number of very large metal sculptures, always experimenting and adapting his methods, with an acute awareness of his environment natural, social and political as well as a considered insight into contemporary art-making, tempered by an understanding of the global context (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005: 118).
Throughout Villa s career, the universality of humankind, expressing the multifaceted human condition, has been a dominant theme and concern (Berman, 1980). According to Berman, Villa s work transformed the way in which South Africans perceive sculpture: [It] is in the conceptual substance of his oeuvre that his most significant achievement lies. Edoardo Villa has been uniquely able to translate his South African experience into symbolic visual form (2005: 4) .
Today, Edoardo Villa s public sculptures mark the metropolitan landscape of Johannesburg his sculptures are better represented in that city than the work of any other artist. His numerous works have transformed the urban landscape of many South African cities, as Villa has created an unsurpassed body of work in number, quality and scale (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005). He has established himself as a prominent figure in the South African art scene, as a member of the South African Arts Association and the South African Council of Artists, and through long-standing relationships with prominent universities, such as the University of Pretoria and the University of Johannesburg. He has represented South Africa at the S o Paulo Biennale as well as in the Venice Biennale on five occasions, and has had more than 100 solo and group shows worldwide.
The Edoardo Villa Museum at the University of Pretoria was opened in 1995, on his 80th birthday. He also received the Chancellor s Medal of the University of Pretoria. A second Villa museum was established close to his birthplace, in Treviglio, by Giovanni Cervi, a fervent collector of his sculptures.
www.edoardovilla.co.za:
When he died at the stately age of 95 in 2011, the Sunday Times hailed Edoardo Villa as South Africa s most prolific and famous sculptor . It was no empty plaudit. Villa, who was born in 1915 on the outskirts of the northern Italian town of Bergamo, produced one of the major bodies of sculpture in twentieth-century South Africa. Numbering over 1000 works, Villa s muscular sculptures, which ranged from solid volumes in bronze to curved surfaces and elongated cylinders in steel, played a decisive role in modernising the language of South African sculpture.
His work straddles a key moment in South African art history, coming after the accomplished if conservative figurative work of Anton van Wouw and directly influencing the syncretic modernism of Sydney Kumalo and Ezrom Legae, both mentored by Villa. His involvement with dealer Egon Guenther s Amadlozi Group of artists he was a founding member with Kumalo, Giuseppe Cattaneo, Cecily Sash and Cecil Skotnes positioned him as both a creative innovator and political progressive. Villa s output as a sculptor is also as singular and enigmatic as that of Jackson Hlungwani.
Trained at the Scuola D Arte Andrea Fontoni, a conservative Bergamo art school named after an Italian sculptor and woodcarver of the late-Baroque period, Villa s conscription into the Italian military and later capture in Egypt radically changed his life path. Sent to South Africa, where he was imprisoned in Zonderwater, an internment camp east of Pretoria, Villa decided to stay in the country and work as an artist after his release in 1947. That same year he held his first exhibition in the Johannesburg Library.
The sculptor s early years in Johannesburg were characterised by poverty, struggle and doubt, but also by experimentation and personal development. He struck up key friendships with vanguard artists and in 1955 moved into a house in Parktown North with Stanley Dorfman, a noted young painter and associate of Christo Coetzee and Douglas Portway, both important abstract painters. When Portway emigrated to England in the late 1950s Villa bought his house in Kew. Working from the same address for the next half century, Villa produced a rigorous body of work noted for its diverse use of materials, forms and colours.
Villa s importance lies in his volumetric experiments and abstracted interpretations of the human form in bronze and constructed steel. His earliest work was figurative and produced in bronze, a material he would return to in different ways over the coming decades. It was Portway who suggested he experiment with cut steel. Villa later started adding colour to his steel constructions in the early 1960s and subsequently went through periods of rejecting it because of the way colour diminished the essential and monumental character of his work. But he would just as often return to colour, drawn to its playfulness and immediate emotive impact in an increasingly cluttered world.
The widespread visibility of Villa s sculptures in public spaces across the country today makes his success appear self-evident. Edoardo s anti-establishment role is seldom understood, says artist and historian Karel Nel, who knew Villa personally and is a trustee of the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust. Working from his home without institutional support Villa formulated a practice that synthetized his European heritage with African influences. Along with his pioneering mentorship activities this formal aspects of his practice further challenged the narrative of separate development. It was never an easy option and Villa had to rely on private collectors like Vittorino Meneghelli and John Schlesinger to sustain his early career. The modernist architect Monty Sack was also an important early patron, prominently placing Villa s work outside new office blocks in central Johannesburg in the 1960s, further advancing the idea of Villa as a leading contemporary artist of his time.
Throughout his career Villa cultivated a worldly practice that was synchronous with the boldest developments in modernist sculpture globally. He understood the international art world, but at the same time his work engaged with being African, says Nel. Edoardo was not reproducing Anthony Caro or David Smith; his work is not pastiche of Euro-American modernism. He had the ability to absorb and transform what he experienced in South Africa to create a very powerful body of work.
Art patron and Villa trustee Benji Liebmann agrees: Like Henry Moore he was concerned with the interpretation of the human form, but his was a uniquely African take, and strictly personal. Edoardo s work revealed not only his strong political and humanist views as well as his enduring joie de vivre. Villa s humanism is central to an appreciation of his work. Speaking to artist and teacher Allan Crump in 1988, during his residency as guest artist at the Standard Bank Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown, Villa remarked: If anything could sum up my fundamental concern in art, it is that of the human and the individual the human condition.
The activities of Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust aim to celebrate and promote this rich artistic legacy by ensuring that Villa s important contributions to South African art history remain clear and accessible, now and into the future.
www.everard-read.co.za:
In the 1980s he repeatedly returned to using pipes in his works, which he had begun in the 1970s, as well as the incorporation of colour into his sculptures. As noted by Von Maltitz and Nel, Colour, for Villa, has always been an important means of amplifying the mood he intends the work to project at times brooding, moody and aggressive; at others, light-hearted and joyous. He also completed a number of small steel works, and a series of sculptures such as Metamorphosis , in which organic shapes predominate. Since, 1990 he has produced a number of very large metal sculptures, always experimenting and adapting his methods, with an acute awareness of his environment natural, social and political as well as a considered insight into contemporary art-making, tempered by an understanding of the global context (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005: 118).
Throughout Villa s career, the universality of humankind, expressing the multifaceted human condition, has been concern (Berman, 1980). According to Berman, Villa s work transformed the way in which South Africans perceive sculpture: [It] is in the conceptual substance of his oeuvre that his most significant achievement lies. Edoardo Villa has been uniquely able to translate his South African experience into symbolic visual form (2005: 4) .
Today, Edoardo Villa s public sculptures mark the metropolitan landscape of Johannesburg his sculptures are better represented in that city than the work of any other artist. His numerous works have transformed the urban landscape of many South African cities, as Villa has created an unsurpassed body of work in number, quality and scale (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005). He has established himself as a prominent figure in the South African art scene, as a member of the South African Arts Association and the South African Council of Artists, and through long-standing relationships with prominent universities, such as the University of Pretoria and the University He has represented South Africa at the Sao Paulo Biennale as well as in the Venice Biennale on five occasions, and has had more than 100 solo and group shows worldwide.
www.wikipedia.org:
Edoardo Daniele Villa (1915 2011) was a notable South African sculptor of Italian descent who worked primarily in steel, and bronze.
Villa's sculpture developed further during the 1950s, when the use of cut steel and bronze. At this time he also taught at the Polly Art Centre in Johannesburg. The Polly Art Centre was founded as an adult education institution; in 1952 it was converted into an art and exhibition centre. Until its closure in 1960, it was the only place apart from a few private galleries where black artists in Johannesburg could pursue their art and show their works.
In 1961, along with Cecil Skotnes, Cecily Sash, Giuseppe Cattaneo and Sydney Kumalo, Villa made up the artist group Amadlozi (Zulu for ancestors ) for the conscious appropriation of African sculptural tradla's work includes larger than life steel installations, such as Reclining Figure in Pieter Roos Park, Johannesburg. This work was intended as a play statue for children, paid for by Anglo American, selected by the Parktown and Westcliffe Heritage Trust and donated to the City of Johannesburg and unveiled by the Deputy Mayor of Johannesburg Councillor C.E. Fabel on 8 September 1984.
Edoardo Villa represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale on five occasions and he has received awards at the S o Paulo Biennales of 1957 and 1959. He has exhibited in over a hundred shows in Italy, Europe, England, Israel, South America, Africa and the United States.
In 1994/1995 Villa donated 140 small and 10 large works to the University of Pretoria. On 31 May 1995, to celebrate the artist's 80th birthday, the Edoardo Villa Museum was officially opened at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Villa lived and worked at his home in Johannesburg, He was a friend of the artist and art collector, Vittorino Menegelli, the author Jillian Becker and the architect Monty Sack. Villa died in hospital on 1 May 2011 at age 95.
Every time I walk through the garden of the University of Pretoria I see the artwork Reclining Figure III by Edoardo Daniele Villa.
I see the curved gun barrels and the battle shields. They lie on top of each other as if they are playing.
In my mind I also hear the elders talking about the sorrow of lost friends. It is much better to have a frisky fight with each other when there is a difference of opinion than to go to war.
Edoardo Daniele Villa means a lot to the African community. He knows the stories and has an exceptionally great creative talent to convert concrete experiences into an abstract artwork.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Robbertje vechten
Steeds als ik door de tuin loop van de Universiteit van Pretoria zie ik het kunstwerk Reclining Figure III van Edoardo Daniele Villa.
Dan zie ik de gebogen geweerslopen en de gevechtsschilden. Ze liggen over elkaar heen of zij aan het spelen zijn.
In gedachten hoor ik ook weer de oudsten vertellen over het verdriet van de verloren vrienden. Het is veel beter om met elkaar een robbertje te vechten bij een meningsverschil, dan om oorlog te voeren.
Edoardo Daniele Villa betekent veel voor de Afrikaanse gemeenschap. Hij kent de verhalen en heeft een bijzonder groot creatief talent om concrete ervaringen om te zetten in een abstract kunstwerk.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com.
www.artsdot.com:
A sculpture, titled, Reclining Figure is a painted steel work by the Italian-born South African artist, Edoardo Villa (1915-2011).The work is a stylized artillery cannon but also a figure trying to stand upright. Several reclining figures were created by Villa as part of his war series symbolic of a damaged cannon and a wounded soldier. Villa was the captain of an artillery contingent in North Africa during the Second World War. His placement was overrun by the British at 9 December 1941, during a reconnaissance mission by the Allied forces just before the Battle of Sidi Barrani. He was wounded and spent some time in Egypt recuperating from his injuries.Later in that year, Villa was shipped, with thousands of other prisoners of war (POW), to South Africa where he was interned at Zonderwater, a prison camp near Pretoria, just outside the town of Cullinan. The work was donated by Villa in 1990 to the University of Pretoria. The University of Pretoria has one of the most extensive Villa collections of this notable South African sculptor, born in Italy. Villa worked primarily in steel and bronze and his works is abstract art and cubist. Short Biography: Edoardo Daniele Villa was born in 31 May 1915 in Bergamo, Italy. Here he studied at the Andrea Fortini Art School under Minotti, Barbieri and Lodi, his studies brought home to cities like Milan and Rome. In 1939 Edoardo Villa was conscripted into the Italian Army and wounded in Egypt at the battle of Sidi Barrani during the Second World War in 1940. Villa was taken prisoner and was subsequently brought to South Africa as a prisoner of war and interned at the Zonderwater Prisoner of War (POW) Camp near Pretoria. Villa was released in 1947 and remained in South Africa where he practised his art as a sculptor. Villa adopted his new country and became one of the most noted and accomplished abstract sculptors of his time. In 1965, Villa married Claire Zafeirakou who was his companion until she passed away in November 2010. Edoardo Villa lived in Johannesburg until his death on 1 May 2011.
www.theviewingroom.co.za:
Unlike most of his fellow prisoners, Villa decided to stay in South Africa on his release in 1947, settling in Johannesburg. He went on to become the foremost abstract sculptor in South Africa - rejecting traditional European art practices and mimetic sculpture that defined the South African scene in the 1950s. Villa started to explore an African character in his work, bringing in elements of the highveld landscape; its plant forms, brilliant sun, dramatic shadows and rock formations - manifested in sharp contours and intersecting flat and curved planes (Berman, 2005). In the early 1950s, Villa s friend Douglas Portway recommended he experiment with constructing sculptures by welding pieces of metal together after Picasso and Gonzales had begun working in this medium. At the start of the 1950s, Villa toured Italy with fellow Italian-born artist Giuseppe Cattaneo. In South Africa, he started a new trend that he would continue throughout his career, holding open-air exhibitions in Joubert Park, in Johannesburg (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005).
Villa s use of Cubist and Constructivist techniques and his creative use of steel, exploring the possibilities of bent and welded metal, characterised his break with descriptive conventions (Berman, 2005: 4). In line with Cubism, he became interested in traditional African sculpture, and a new formal language that appreciated the geometric forms in much African sculpture (Maurice and Dodd, 2009). During the 1960 s, Villa s work engaged in a dialogue between constructed steel and sculpture modeled for casting (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005: 48).
Another significant development in Villa s career was when he met Lucas Legodi in 1964, and the two began a long-standing friendship and co-operation, working together on large sculptures. The two were able to produce more prolifically, accelerating Villa s development, as works could be completed much quicker. Rather than working on an individual sculpture, Villa often worked on a series of works in which a formal idea was explored for possible variations of form and meaning (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005).
Villa was passionately dedicated to the creation of an African identity in his work an aim which was initiated and further explored through his friendship with two collectors of modern and African art, Egon Guenther and Vittorini Meneghelli. He became a member of the Amadlozi group, along with Cecil Skotnes, Sydney Kumalo, Giuseppe Cattaneo and Cecily Sash. In 1963, Egon Guenther organised an exhibition for the Amadlozi group around different cities in Italy, showing their work in Rome, Venice, Milan and Florence.
According to Esm Berman, his work began to speak convincingly, not of the appearance, but of the experience of Africa . This is most noticeable in his works of a more serious nature, such as Confrontation of 1978, which illustrates Villa s concern with the human dynamics of the political conflict after the Soweto student uprising in 1976. It is not difficult to see this work as encapsulating all the pain, defiance and anger arising from the implacable conflict of values that hallmarked the uprisings of 1976 , write Von Maltitz and Nel.
Close to seven decades of Villa s career has seen his work undergo remarkable stylistic transformations. Figurative, descriptive heads, busts and reliefs gave way to the stylized abstraction of modernist shapes inspired by the African landscape, and finally to the colourful works of structural abstraction which typify the latter part of his oeuvre. During the 1980 s, Villa completed a large number of public commissions, in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban and Johannesburg, experimenting with different sculptural forms and techniques. His largest exhibition, Villa at 80 , was held in Johannesburg in 1995, with nearly 300 works on display. Following the successful exhibition, articles were frequently published on Villa s work, in both South Africa and Italy, emphasising Villa s impact on the development of South African art.
In the 1980s he repeatedly returned to using pipes in his works, which he had begun in the 1970s, as well as the incorporation of colour into his sculptures. As noted by Von Maltitz and Nel, Colour, for Villa, has always been an important means of amplifying the mood he intends the work to project at times brooding, moody and aggressive; at others, light-hearted and joyous. He also completed a number of small steel works, and a series of sculptures such as Metamorphosis , in which organic shapes predominate. Since, 1990 he has produced a number of very large metal sculptures, always experimenting and adapting his methods, with an acute awareness of his environment natural, social and political as well as a considered insight into contemporary art-making, tempered by an understanding of the global context (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005: 118).
Throughout Villa s career, the universality of humankind, expressing the multifaceted human condition, has been a dominant theme and concern (Berman, 1980). According to Berman, Villa s work transformed the way in which South Africans perceive sculpture: [It] is in the conceptual substance of his oeuvre that his most significant achievement lies. Edoardo Villa has been uniquely able to translate his South African experience into symbolic visual form (2005: 4) .
Today, Edoardo Villa s public sculptures mark the metropolitan landscape of Johannesburg his sculptures are better represented in that city than the work of any other artist. His numerous works have transformed the urban landscape of many South African cities, as Villa has created an unsurpassed body of work in number, quality and scale (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005). He has established himself as a prominent figure in the South African art scene, as a member of the South African Arts Association and the South African Council of Artists, and through long-standing relationships with prominent universities, such as the University of Pretoria and the University of Johannesburg. He has represented South Africa at the S o Paulo Biennale as well as in the Venice Biennale on five occasions, and has had more than 100 solo and group shows worldwide.
The Edoardo Villa Museum at the University of Pretoria was opened in 1995, on his 80th birthday. He also received the Chancellor s Medal of the University of Pretoria. A second Villa museum was established close to his birthplace, in Treviglio, by Giovanni Cervi, a fervent collector of his sculptures.
www.edoardovilla.co.za:
When he died at the stately age of 95 in 2011, the Sunday Times hailed Edoardo Villa as South Africa s most prolific and famous sculptor . It was no empty plaudit. Villa, who was born in 1915 on the outskirts of the northern Italian town of Bergamo, produced one of the major bodies of sculpture in twentieth-century South Africa. Numbering over 1000 works, Villa s muscular sculptures, which ranged from solid volumes in bronze to curved surfaces and elongated cylinders in steel, played a decisive role in modernising the language of South African sculpture.
His work straddles a key moment in South African art history, coming after the accomplished if conservative figurative work of Anton van Wouw and directly influencing the syncretic modernism of Sydney Kumalo and Ezrom Legae, both mentored by Villa. His involvement with dealer Egon Guenther s Amadlozi Group of artists he was a founding member with Kumalo, Giuseppe Cattaneo, Cecily Sash and Cecil Skotnes positioned him as both a creative innovator and political progressive. Villa s output as a sculptor is also as singular and enigmatic as that of Jackson Hlungwani.
Trained at the Scuola D Arte Andrea Fontoni, a conservative Bergamo art school named after an Italian sculptor and woodcarver of the late-Baroque period, Villa s conscription into the Italian military and later capture in Egypt radically changed his life path. Sent to South Africa, where he was imprisoned in Zonderwater, an internment camp east of Pretoria, Villa decided to stay in the country and work as an artist after his release in 1947. That same year he held his first exhibition in the Johannesburg Library.
The sculptor s early years in Johannesburg were characterised by poverty, struggle and doubt, but also by experimentation and personal development. He struck up key friendships with vanguard artists and in 1955 moved into a house in Parktown North with Stanley Dorfman, a noted young painter and associate of Christo Coetzee and Douglas Portway, both important abstract painters. When Portway emigrated to England in the late 1950s Villa bought his house in Kew. Working from the same address for the next half century, Villa produced a rigorous body of work noted for its diverse use of materials, forms and colours.
Villa s importance lies in his volumetric experiments and abstracted interpretations of the human form in bronze and constructed steel. His earliest work was figurative and produced in bronze, a material he would return to in different ways over the coming decades. It was Portway who suggested he experiment with cut steel. Villa later started adding colour to his steel constructions in the early 1960s and subsequently went through periods of rejecting it because of the way colour diminished the essential and monumental character of his work. But he would just as often return to colour, drawn to its playfulness and immediate emotive impact in an increasingly cluttered world.
The widespread visibility of Villa s sculptures in public spaces across the country today makes his success appear self-evident. Edoardo s anti-establishment role is seldom understood, says artist and historian Karel Nel, who knew Villa personally and is a trustee of the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust. Working from his home without institutional support Villa formulated a practice that synthetized his European heritage with African influences. Along with his pioneering mentorship activities this formal aspects of his practice further challenged the narrative of separate development. It was never an easy option and Villa had to rely on private collectors like Vittorino Meneghelli and John Schlesinger to sustain his early career. The modernist architect Monty Sack was also an important early patron, prominently placing Villa s work outside new office blocks in central Johannesburg in the 1960s, further advancing the idea of Villa as a leading contemporary artist of his time.
Throughout his career Villa cultivated a worldly practice that was synchronous with the boldest developments in modernist sculpture globally. He understood the international art world, but at the same time his work engaged with being African, says Nel. Edoardo was not reproducing Anthony Caro or David Smith; his work is not pastiche of Euro-American modernism. He had the ability to absorb and transform what he experienced in South Africa to create a very powerful body of work.
Art patron and Villa trustee Benji Liebmann agrees: Like Henry Moore he was concerned with the interpretation of the human form, but his was a uniquely African take, and strictly personal. Edoardo s work revealed not only his strong political and humanist views as well as his enduring joie de vivre. Villa s humanism is central to an appreciation of his work. Speaking to artist and teacher Allan Crump in 1988, during his residency as guest artist at the Standard Bank Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown, Villa remarked: If anything could sum up my fundamental concern in art, it is that of the human and the individual the human condition.
The activities of Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust aim to celebrate and promote this rich artistic legacy by ensuring that Villa s important contributions to South African art history remain clear and accessible, now and into the future.
www.everard-read.co.za:
In the 1980s he repeatedly returned to using pipes in his works, which he had begun in the 1970s, as well as the incorporation of colour into his sculptures. As noted by Von Maltitz and Nel, Colour, for Villa, has always been an important means of amplifying the mood he intends the work to project at times brooding, moody and aggressive; at others, light-hearted and joyous. He also completed a number of small steel works, and a series of sculptures such as Metamorphosis , in which organic shapes predominate. Since, 1990 he has produced a number of very large metal sculptures, always experimenting and adapting his methods, with an acute awareness of his environment natural, social and political as well as a considered insight into contemporary art-making, tempered by an understanding of the global context (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005: 118).
Throughout Villa s career, the universality of humankind, expressing the multifaceted human condition, has been concern (Berman, 1980). According to Berman, Villa s work transformed the way in which South Africans perceive sculpture: [It] is in the conceptual substance of his oeuvre that his most significant achievement lies. Edoardo Villa has been uniquely able to translate his South African experience into symbolic visual form (2005: 4) .
Today, Edoardo Villa s public sculptures mark the metropolitan landscape of Johannesburg his sculptures are better represented in that city than the work of any other artist. His numerous works have transformed the urban landscape of many South African cities, as Villa has created an unsurpassed body of work in number, quality and scale (Von Maltitz and Nel, 2005). He has established himself as a prominent figure in the South African art scene, as a member of the South African Arts Association and the South African Council of Artists, and through long-standing relationships with prominent universities, such as the University of Pretoria and the University He has represented South Africa at the Sao Paulo Biennale as well as in the Venice Biennale on five occasions, and has had more than 100 solo and group shows worldwide.
www.wikipedia.org:
Edoardo Daniele Villa (1915 2011) was a notable South African sculptor of Italian descent who worked primarily in steel, and bronze.
Villa's sculpture developed further during the 1950s, when the use of cut steel and bronze. At this time he also taught at the Polly Art Centre in Johannesburg. The Polly Art Centre was founded as an adult education institution; in 1952 it was converted into an art and exhibition centre. Until its closure in 1960, it was the only place apart from a few private galleries where black artists in Johannesburg could pursue their art and show their works.
In 1961, along with Cecil Skotnes, Cecily Sash, Giuseppe Cattaneo and Sydney Kumalo, Villa made up the artist group Amadlozi (Zulu for ancestors ) for the conscious appropriation of African sculptural tradla's work includes larger than life steel installations, such as Reclining Figure in Pieter Roos Park, Johannesburg. This work was intended as a play statue for children, paid for by Anglo American, selected by the Parktown and Westcliffe Heritage Trust and donated to the City of Johannesburg and unveiled by the Deputy Mayor of Johannesburg Councillor C.E. Fabel on 8 September 1984.
Edoardo Villa represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale on five occasions and he has received awards at the S o Paulo Biennales of 1957 and 1959. He has exhibited in over a hundred shows in Italy, Europe, England, Israel, South America, Africa and the United States.
In 1994/1995 Villa donated 140 small and 10 large works to the University of Pretoria. On 31 May 1995, to celebrate the artist's 80th birthday, the Edoardo Villa Museum was officially opened at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Villa lived and worked at his home in Johannesburg, He was a friend of the artist and art collector, Vittorino Menegelli, the author Jillian Becker and the architect Monty Sack. Villa died in hospital on 1 May 2011 at age 95.