Exploded View : Edoardo Villa & 21st Century Sculpture

By PETRA MASON March 15th, 2026

Cape Town, South Africa: Après art week in the aftermath of the Mother City’s summertime Investec Cape Town Art Fair remarkable art can still be seen in the city and surrounds. PETRA MASON selects Exploded View: Edoardo Villa & 21st Century Sculpture.

An exhibition that places one of South Africa's most famous and prolific sculptors Edoardo Villa (Jackson Hlungwani is 2/2) in dialogue with contemporary South African works by several living artists. The central Cape Town Roodehek Street location and artworks inadvertantly adding another layer to the city's 350 year + history.

Edoardo Villa, Thrust I, 1983/84 © Petra Mason 

While the geographically liberated generation of digital nomads staying in the aparthotel, taking ice baths or simply overnighting at Black Brick may roll their Ramowa carry-ons past stand out pieces like Shy Restrained Glass Thing by Richard John Forbes or use Villa’s Reclining Figure III as a beacon on the street, the generosity of University of Pretoria (UP) and Black Brick property founders hosting an exhibition of this scale is enormous. Showcased inside and outside the property and strategically placed in selected precincts nearby you will need a QR code, a map, a drone or a guide to see it all. Art walks, talks and cocktails are key to any exhibition's visibility, and even more so in unexpected gallery spaces like this. The founders are real pros though with several developments centering culture. Black Brick Gardens has an energetic events schedule to rival any private club, as well as the most stylish Afropolitan guest's on the Continent.

Edoardo Villa, Reclining Figure III,1990 ©Petra Mason 

Exploded View offers the city of Cape Town a rare opportunity to engage with works by the artist, who died in Johannesburg at 95 in 2011.Villa never exhibited internationally, in part due to the apartheid-era cultural boycotts that existed throughout most of his career and due to the scale of his works. Framed by the coastal city of Cape Town and in a habitable gallery for our collective benefit,Villa in this setting and in conversation with others becomes a multi-lingualist. With the arid highveld bushveld environment as the artists chosen backdrop, the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria played starring roles in Villa's view and the artist seldom exhibited in Cape Town.

Exploded View is a monumental exhibition with modest goals: 'To challenge simplistic North–South divides’ to ‘reveal African aesthetics and this moment in South Africa'.

Catalogue here:
https://designrr.page/?id=486395&token=1341718274&type=FP&h=6502&singlePage=0&startPage=1