It is in his many orgy scenes, in colour, in ink, and in his trademark white on black, that Walter Battiss took the complexity and patterning of large numbers of intertwined naked bodies to the extreme. Writhing piles of interpenetration, mountains of copulation, countless couplings, bacchanalia central.

In his invented world of Fook Island, his fully imagined utopian space where societal norms do not apply and sexuality is portrayed with whimsy, joy and innocence, regular orgies were – fictionally and artistically – both encouraged and celebrated.

It goes without saying that much of Battiss’s erotic art wasn’t widely exhibited during his lifetime due to conservative attitudes in apartheid-era South Africa. However, these works reveal how Walter Battiss quietly challenged repression and censorship through his art.