Edoardo Villa’s gift for sculpture was manifested early in his birth town of Bergamo, when he was awarded numerous commissions to create bas reliefs for people’s homes before he was twenty years old. He was a member of the art collective Amadlozi, whose driving ethos was to reflect their surroundings by creating distinctly African-inspired artworks. Villa’s sculptures emphasise the verticality of the human figure, as revealed in the allegorical work Mother and Child. In its abstract and purist simplicity, Villa’s rendering evokes the compositional structure of stereometric forms. Column-like in its upright stance, Mother and Child is an unbroken geometric flow of lines, which conspicuously accentuates the style of its African-inspired formal elements. Villa prioritises lines, shapes, and spherical dimensions over distinguishable facial expressions, connoting a universalist principle. In Johannesburg in the 1960s, Villa had access to public and private collections of African art. During this period, stylistic similarities were made between his work and the arts of Central Africa.
—Zamansele Nsele
