For more than two decades, South African-born artist Robin Rhode—based in Berlin since 2002—has explored the body as a sculptural instrument. Using walls, streets, and architectural surfaces as stages, Rhode has built a practice where movement, drawing, and photography merge into a language of embodied form. His work transforms the most ordinary surfaces into sites of performance, where the body inscribes itself into space.

Rhode’s residency at the Villa-Legodi focuses on learning particular stone-working skills through practical skills transfer, enabling the development of this new body of work. The new stone-related sculptures translate ephemeral bodily gestures into material permanence, compressing movement, resistance, and play into depth, surface, and weight.

The body-as-sculpture is central to Rhode’s idiom, yet it has historically manifested in ephemerality: chalk lines erased by movement, photographs capturing transient gestures, or videos recording playful confrontations with urban space. Translating these performative traces into relief sculpture would constitute both a continuity and a rupture. On one hand, the relief preserves the immediacy of gesture—compressing bodily exertion into depth, contour, and surface modulation. On the other hand, it introduces permanence and material density, situating Rhode’s otherwise fugitive actions within the sculptural tradition that the Villa-Legodi, as a centre dedicated to the legacy of Edoardo Villa, actively cultivates.

The Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture, dedicated to the evolving tradition of South African sculpture, provides an ideal setting for this shift. Rhode’s reliefs enter into dialogue with the site’s architectural and sculptural legacies, rooting his international practice in local histories. They affirm the wall not as background but as active register of corporeal presence, where play, struggle, and imagination leave enduring traces.

Robin Rhode: Body as Sculpture invites audiences to encounter sculpture as an archive of the body, where movement becomes matter and gesture assumes monumental form.