Grahamstown Festival 1999 - Kentridge

Date: 1999
Size:  26.5 x 38
Notes: Poster, Linen Backed
Artist: Kentridege, William
Information: For more details, please call 514 656 3301

About The Poster: This poster was given as gift to the former Dutch consul in Montreal when he was posted in South Africa as a gift by the South African government to him at the end of his posting in that country. It is hand signed and numbered by the artist. The poster measures 26.5 x 38 inches and has been professionally mounted on linen to protect its physical integrity. William Kentridge is considered by many to be the greatest living South African artists of this - or any other - time. He is multi-disciplinary: his works encompass print-making (as evidenced in this work), as well as video installations, paintings, full scale opera productions (he just - for the 2010 season - produced an original interpretation of Gogol’s the Nose for New York’s Metropolitan Opera), as well as puppet shows... In an abstract excerpt from a story written in 2010 by Calvin Tompkins for the New Yorker about the artist, it was written: "...Nearly four hundred people had come to see him. The overflow turnout was an indication of how influential Kentridge’s work has become since 1997, when his drawings, prints, and strangely compelling animated films started to register outside his native city of Johannesburg. A major Kentridge exhibition opens on February 24 at the Museum of Modern Art and on March 5th, a Kentridge-directed-and-designed production of "The Nose," the rarely performed opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, will have its première at the Metropolitan Opera. It’s hard to remember when a visual artist has cut such a wide swath in the city’s cultural life, or spanned so many disciplines with such aplomb. Writer recalls the first time he saw a Kentridge film, in 1999, at the Museum of Modern Art. The film was “Stereoscope,” an eight-minute sequence of hand-drawn animations. “Stereoscope” is the eighth of Kentridge’s “Nine Drawings for Projection,” the series that launched international interest in his work. Kentridge told the writer that the first film in the series, titled “Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris,” came about more or less by accident in the late eighties. Describes how Kentridge came to make his first films, using what the artist calls “stone-age animation.” Tells about Kentridge’s childhood and upbringing. His father was a leading lawyer in the anti-apartheid movement and his mother co-founded the most important public-interest law firm in South Africa. Discusses his early drawing classes with an artist named Bill Ainslie. Kentridge attended the University of the Witwatersrand and later helped start the Junction Avenue Theatre Company. He studied at Jacques Lecoq’s theatre school in Paris. He and his wife Anne returned to South Africa in 1982. Kentridge believes the cultural boycott of South Africa made it easier for him to find his way as an artist. He could work quietly on his own without trying to keep abreast of current developments elsewhere. Tells about Kentridge’s work with the Handspring Puppet Company and his staging of “The Magic Flute” for the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. “The Magic Flute” was warmly received and it came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in 2007, after highly successful runs in Europe. Describes how Kentridge came to discover Gogol’s story “The Nose.” He learned of the Shostakovich opera soon afterward. In 2005, Peter Gelb approached Kentridge about staging an opera at the Met. The opera Gelb had in mind was Verdi’s “Attila.” Kentridge said he was not interested in “Attila” and proposed “The Nose.” The article was written in conjunction with the opening of an exhibition devoted to Kentridge at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). The MOMA exhibition notes state: “This large-scale exhibition surveys nearly three decades of work by William Kentridge (b. 1955, South Africa), a remarkably versatile artist whose work combines the political with the poetic. Dealing with subjects as sobering as apartheid, colonialism, and totalitarianism, his work is often imbued with dreamy, lyrical undertones or comedic bits of self-deprecation that render his powerful messages both alluring and ambivalent. Best known for animated films based on charcoal drawings, he also works in prints, books, collage, sculpture, and the performing arts. This exhibition explores five primary themes in Kentridge’s art from the 1980s to the present, and underscores the inter relatedness of his mediums and disciplines, particularly through a selection of works from the Museum’s collection. Included are works related to the artist’s staging and design of Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose,which premieres at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in March 2010.”

Kentridge himself, seemingly a modest man, has said that He had hoped to become an actor, however: “I was fortunate to discover at a theatre school that I was so bad an actor [... that] I was reduced to an artist, and I made my peace with it.” The political content and unique techniques of Kentridge’s work have propelled him into the realm of South Africa's top artists. Working with what is in essence a very restrictive media, using only charcoal and a touch of blue or red pastel, he has created animations of astounding depth. A theme running through all of his work is his peculiar way of representing his birthplace. While he does not portray it as the militant or oppressive place that it was for black people, he does not emphasize the picturesque state of living that white people enjoyed during apartheid either; he presents instead a city in which the duality of man is exposed.William Kentridge's work is heavily context-dependent, coming as he does from South Africa, a nation whose native people became second-class citizens under an only recently abolished apartheid set by colonising Europeans. Kentridge himself is of European descent, and as such has a unique position as a third-party observer. His parents were lawyers, famous for their defence of victims of the apartheid, giving Kentridge the ability to remove himself somewhat from the atrocities committed.“My drawings don’t start with a “beautiful mark” ”, writes Kentridge, thinking about the activity of printmaking as being about getting the hand to lead the brain, rather than letting the brain lead the hand. “It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn’t have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion.”