Pretoria-born artist Alexis Preller studied art in London at the Westminster School of Art and expanded his knowledge of art and art history by reading voraciously and travelling widely in Europe and Africa. He studied Egyptian, ancient Greek, Etruscan, early Renaissance and southern and central African art and culture, in particular, and created an art that was of his own place and time rather than a continuation of either traditional European practice or avant-garde Modernism. He visited Ndebele settlements near Pretoria in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the ‘Mapogga’ women in their distinctive traditional costume and the colourful geometric wall paintings that decorated the homesteads appear in his work from this time. His work became progressively more abstract in later years, informed by his interest in space travel and discovery, and his focus shifted from the local and the African to encompass the universal.