William Kentridge: The Other Side of the Press – Artist as Printmaker

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William Kentridge is one of South Africa’s pre-eminent artists, internationally acclaimed for his films, drawings, theatre and opera productions. He is also an innovative and prolific printmaker; he started his career studying etching at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, and printmaking has remained central to his work ever since. In the past two and a half decades he has produced more than 300 prints, etchings, engravings, aquatints, silkscreens, linocuts and lithographs, often experimenting with challenging formats and combinations of techniques. Many of his key themes are explored in his prints and he has said that there have been ‘many projects that have ended up as either a piece of theatre or an animated film which have their origins in printmaking’.

This major exhibition will include 120 – 150 prints in all media, from 1988 to the present, with a stress on experimental and serial works. Kentridge is currently working on a new series of prints which will be included and shown here for the first time. His distinctive use of light and shadow and silhouettes, his concern with memory and perspective, and his absorption in literary texts, are all strongly in evidence. The prints range in scale from intimate etchings and drypoints to linocuts measuring 2.5 metres high.

A centre-piece will be Portage (2000), an accordion-folded multi-panelled book, 4 metres long, with torn paper silhouetted figures collaged onto unbound pages of the French encyclopedia Le Nouveau Larousse Illustré. The figures, like those in his animated masterpiece, Shadow Procession, flow from left to right, some dancing, some bearing possessions on their backs. They are evocative of the displaced migrant workers in apartheid-era South Africa and the plight of refugees worldwide, but also paradoxically, the exuberant atmosphere of carnival. The procession is one of Kentridge’s great themes, ultimately a symbol of humanity’s journey through life.

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Other Highlights:

Little Morals (1991), a series of eight Goya-esque etchings with sugar lifts, inspired by Adorno’s Minima Moralia. It coincided with the seminal series of animated films, 9 Drawings for Projection chronicling South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, and includes many of the same images.

Ubu Tells the Truth (1996-7), a series of eight etchings with soft ground, aquatint and drypoint. Each print layers the impressions of two separate plates, one showing a figure based on Kentridge himself, drawn realistically with shading, overlaid with a caricature of Alfred Jarry’s monstrous dictator ‘Ubu Roi’, engraved with a crude chalk-like line, representing Ubu’s imaginary world. This series of prints gave rise to the theatre production, Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), in which the chalk drawn figure was projected above the action onstage.

The Baedeker Series (1999), three etchings in which is featured one of Kentridge’s favourite motifs, the megaphone, signifying ‘what needs to be heard or seen, outside of oneself. I draw megaphones because they appear for example in photographs of Italian Futurist concerts for factory workers. I feel I’m part of earlier heroic attempts at connecting with the world of art’.

Living Language (1999), a series of experimental drypoint prints on vinyl 33rpm LPs. The circular shape of the record reappears in many subsequent works in the form of rounded bellies and gramophones.

Atlas Procession (2000), continues the circular theme in an etching featuring a curved horizon in which a procession of cut-out figures is marching around a flattened world atlas. Originally projected onto a ceiling, this work was inspired by Goya’s frescos in San Antonio de la Florida, Madrid.

Walking Man and Telephone Lady (both 2000), two life-sized figures in lino cut, a medium with a strong community-based tradition in South Africa as the cheapest and most accessible form of printmaking.

Zeno at 4.00 am (2001), a series of nine aquatints and drypoints, is one of several works, including a theatre production of the same name, based on Italo Svevo’s novel Confessions of Zeno. Zeno makes another appearance in Zeno II (2003), series of photogravures where Zeno’s life is portrayed in a scene-by-scene filmic way featuring Kentridge’s abstract imagery of shower heads and pylons, some of which were actually in the play.

The Nose (2007-2010), is a series of thirty small–scale prints using various techniques from aquatint and drypoint to engraving and etching. These prints were created for Kentridge’s restaging of Shostokovich’s 1930 opera of the same name, which was inspired by Gogol’s short story from 1836 in which a man’s nose escapes his face and independently gains a higher social status than he.

The exhibition is organised with the generous cooperation of David Krut, in whose Johannesberg print studio William Kentridge produced many of his prints. The artist himself will be personally involved in the production of the catalogue. The possibility of showing one or more major animations alongside the prints is in discussion.

This exhibition coincides with an exceptionally productive period in the artist’s career. William Kentridge: Five Themes opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has shown at major museums in the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as museums and galleries in Paris, Vienna, Jerusalem and Moscow, and will travel to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne in 2012. His production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at La Scala in Milan and his presentation of Shostakovich’s The Nose at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in Spring 2010, were widely praised. In 2012, William Kentridge will participate in Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany.

Tour:

the Bluecoat, Liverpool
7 December 2012 - 3 February 2013

mac, Birmingham (tbc)
March - May 2013

Exhibition available until Spring/Summer 2014. For further information and to register your interest, please email Alison Maun alison.maun@southbankcentre.co.uk indicating your preferred dates.

Information:

100 running metres required

Security Category: A, daylight exclusion / lux level restrictions.

Image credits:

Portage (2000) (detail)
Chine collé of figures from black Canson paper on multiple spreads from Le Nouveau Larousse Illustré Encyclopaedia
Image 27.5 x 423 cm
© the artist (2011)