Notes

Edoardo Villa’s Environment, is made up of an array of angled black steel plates, rectangular cut outs and rounded protrusions. Viewed from any angle, the steel sculpture creates a quirky horizontal anthropomorphic presence. It appears to have a square face with circular eyes or breasts, a torso of abstract wing-like planes and a stumpy round tail at its rear. This sculpture relates to the urban modernist environment, the grid, squares and rectangles of the City of Johannesburg, its architecture heavily influenced by modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Oscar Niemeyer.

Provenance

The steel sculpture, titled Environment was created by Edoardo Villa in 1984 and kept at his home for his personal enjoyment until 2009 when it was acquired by a private collector. The current owner acquired the work in 2017 for a building in Braamfontein that housed the Department of Environmental Affairs.