Madala V

This small bronze with a brown patina is a sculpture, titled Madala V (1967) is by the South African artist, Sydney Alex Kumalo (1935-1988) and is one of a series of eight Madala bronzes produced during his 'golden period'. Kumalo was in his 30s when he commenced his Madala (meaning old man) series which became highly collectable bronzes depicting old men and casts in small editions. The bronze was cast by the Renzo Vignali Artistic Foundry in Pretoria and acquired by the University of Pretoria in 1988, shortly after Kumalo's death. Short biography: Sydney Kumalo was born in 1935 in Sophiatown Johannesburg. As a young man he created tourist artworks in Springs just west of Johannesburg. He began studying at the Polly Street Art Centre in 1952, where he worked under Cecil Skotnes until 1957. In 1958 and 1959 Kumalo worked under the mentorship of the sculptor Edoardo Villa – an artistic apprenticeship which crucially honed and shaped his style and sensibility of the medium. It was Villa who introduced Kumalo to Modernist sculptors like Marino Marini and Henry Moore, as well to the African primitive strain in mid-century European modernism, and promoted the particular fusion of African reference and modernist expression which came to characterise Kumalo’s own expression. Kumalo became one of the most recognised black sculptors of South Africa, even through the dark years of Apartheid. Kumalo died in 1988 in Soweto, a Johannesburg Township.