William Kentridge b.1955

A multidisciplinary artist well known for his charcoal drawings often tied to socio-political conditions in post-apartheid South Africa, William Kentridge aims to record history. In 1994, South African pop group Mango Groove commissioned a short film from Kentridge with the aim, as an activist group, to demonstrate the changes that had occurred in South Africa following the democratic election of Nelson Mandela. The film was used as a music video for the group’s song, Another Country, and was comprised of a montage of Kentridge’s drawings depicting scenes of protest, strikes, and poverty. The present work, Untitled Night Drawing, was created as the final frame of the film and has been in the personal collection of Mango Groove’s lead artist since its creation. Initially creating films as a means of documenting his drawings, the artist has said that the “charcoal drawings come first and the technique of erasure and redrawing was a way of arriving at a static drawing. Then I started filming the process. So the films arrived rather than being decided upon.” Shedding light on a country’s desire for peaceful change in the midst of political shifts, Untitled Night Drawing is a notable example of Kentridge’s oeuvre and provides an exceptional glimpse into his animation techniques that are ultimately rooted in drawing alone.

“I’m not interested in the computer doing the animation, in filling in between and using techniques of drawing on a screen—there’s something about the feel of paper and charcoal that is essential, and that a mousepad and a pressure pen or stylus doesn’t begin to approximate. The analogue basis at the heart of it all is essential.”

A native Johannesburg artist, Kentridge has been lauded with awards such as the Kyoto Prize, 2010; the Oskar Kokoschka Award, 2008; and the Sharjah Biennial 6 Prize, 2003, among others. His work is held in the permanent collections of esteemed museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Kunstmuseum Basel.

Purchased direct from the Publisher, David Krut Fine Art Editions
Private Collection, USA

D. Krut, William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg and Iowa, 2006, p. 66.

The Sleeper series speaks to one of Kentridge’s main themes, the desire to forget or shield oneself from challenging or problematic realities of history and the present day. Works such as the Sleeper series explore the white South African psyche and the relationship to it’s history of exploitation during the period in which the system of apartheid was first contested and then dismantled. Sleep here stands for the state of ‘blissful ignorance’, a preoccupation with the internal and domestic, allowing the public and political world to be forgotten. However a sleeper will always wake, and it is this moment of self-knowledge and recognition that Kentridge returns to in his work.

The ‘Ubu Tells the Truth’ etchings were the starting point for a theatre production ‘Ubu & the Trust Commission’ (1997). The Sleeper prints were made after the theatre production was completed. I had worked on a series of messy drawings of a naked man, sometimes enclosed by the white Ubu line drawing, trying to get some of the feel of the theatre production in them. With the first set of drypoints I had used a thumbprint and printed the heel of my hand to suggest the flesh texture. With the large drawings one has to pull shape and texture into the drawing on a larger scale. I wheeled a bicycle across the paper, hit with a charcoal-impregnated silk rope, invited children and cats to walk over it, spattered it freely with pigment. The Sleeper prints used a range of materials and objects placed in soft ground to try to effect the same damage upon the paper.

Artist
Private collection, Johannesburg
Private collection, USA, 2002

‘Drawing from Il Ritorno d’Ulisse’ is a drawing still from Il Ritorno d’Ulisse – Montiverdi’s opera directed by William Kentridge in 1998 as a multimedia performance. 

The opera was a collaboration between the Handspring Puppet Company, William Kentridge, opera singers from various countries and a Belgian string quartet. 

The role of this drawing within the structure of a play or theatrical performance underpins its significance. William Kentridge is known for his multimedia work using puppets and opera. ‘Ubu’ commissioned by the Truth and Reconicilliation Committee and the ‘Confessions of Zeno’, made to be shown at Documenta XI (2002) are just two of the many important productions worked on by Kentridge.

The opera is based on the Greek legend of the return of Ulysses where the battle-scarred Ulysses returns from an epic voyage to find a home he barely recognises—a place where his face is no longer known, and his waiting wife Penelope beset by those who stand to gain if he never returns.

Homer’s Odyssey is a story of exile and longing, of love, deception and revenge, and it has been retold in almost every conceivable artform, from epic poetry to Hollywood movies; from experimental novels to animé. And, of course, opera. Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse is more than one of the oldest operas in the repertory. It is also a gripping human drama, told through energetic Renaissance dance music and passionate song, bristling with all the emotion, energy and wit of what was—when it was first performed in 1639—state-of-the-art blockbuster entertainment.

Now, visionary director William Kentridge, early music specialists the Ricercar Consort and vocalists specialised in baroque singing, including mezzo-soprano Kristina Hammarström and tenor Jeffrey Thompson, join South Africa’s world-famous Handspring Puppet Company to share their version of Monteverdi’s opera. In a 20th-century Johannesburg hospital, an elderly Ulysses looks back on the events of his life. Through video animation, the power of Monteverdi’s music performed live and Handspring’s extraordinary, life-size puppets, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse blurs the boundaries between human reality and artifice, memory and actuality, to create a powerful, universal and unforgettable operatic experience—like Homer’s original, a timeless epic of absence and adventure, of yearning, love and human fragility, and how fidelity and courage ultimately triumph over deception and greed.