Prints

William Kentridge b. 1955

Kentridge was born in Johannesburg to Sydney and Felicia Kentridge, both his parents advocates (barristers) who represented people marginalized by the apartheid system. He was educated at King Edward VII School in Houghton, Johannesburg. He showed great artistic promise from an early age, and in 2016 became the first artist ever to have a catalogue raisonné devoted to his juvenilia. He earned a degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of Witwatersrand. In the early 1980s, he studied mime and theatre at the L’Ecole Interationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He originally hoped to become an actor, but he reflected later: “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.” ... read more

Kentridge is best known for his animated films, the central focus of Kentridge’s oeuvre has been to examine the years before and after apartheid. The artist conflates his autobiography with that of fictionalized characters to relate his narratives, rendering his signature expressive, gestural drawings in black charcoal and ink. The animated films are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds’ screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. Kentridge gained international acclaim for his short film series 9 Drawings for Projection (1989–2003).

Kentridge works extensively with many forms of printmaking, tapestry, sculpture, theatre and opera sets. In 2016, his solo exhibition “Thick Time” opened at White Chapel Gallery in London to critical acclaim, evoking 1920s-era technology and Dadaist collage. Kentridge has also directed several operas, most notably the 2017 production Wozzeck. The artist continues to live and work in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kentridge’s works are held in the collections The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others.

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William Kentridge Prints

William Kentridge: Sleeper Black, 1997

William Kentridge: Sleeper I, 1997

William Kentridge

Sleeper Black, 1997
Etching, aquatint and drypoint
97 x 193.9 cm (38 ¼ x 76 ⅜ in)

Description

In 1996 Kentridge embarked on a series of etchings to coincide with the centenary of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. In Ubu tells the Truth Kentridge transposed Jarry’s spiral-bellied comic anti-hero with the figure of a naked man based on photographs of Kentridge performing the part of Ubu in his studio. The series was the basis for a theatre production written and directed by the artist, Ubu & the Truth Commission (1997), which in turn was the genesis of The Sleeper prints. ‘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 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 it with 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 on soft ground to try to effect the same damage upon the paper’ (William Kentridge, in: William Kentridge Prints, David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg and New York, 2006, p. 66)

Provenance

Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

Literature

William Kentridge Prints, David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg and New York, 2006, p. 66-69.

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William Kentridge

Sleeper I, 1997
Etching with aquatint
97 x 193 cm (38 ¼ x 76 in)
Signed lower right, Inscribed `Proof' lower left, from the edition of 30

Description

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.