As a student at the University of Witwatersrand in the 1970s, Kentridge focused on politics and African Studies, but then went on to embrace theatre and art, finding them better suited to grappling with the social tension and plight he was experiencing in the world around him. He began to act, write and design sets for the racially integrated Junction Avenue Theatre Company and introduced fine art into his repertoire in 1976–78 while studying at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, where he started making prints and drawings. In 1978, he started to experiment with film and had his first solo show at the Market Gallery in Johannesburg, before moving to Paris in 1981.

This etching dates back to this catalytic early period of Kentridge’s career. Sensual and satirical at once, it features a theatrically large grande dame of the arts lounging on the plush back seat of a luxury automobile. The animal fur slung casually slung around her naked shoulders quietly signals both her lack of conscience and inhibition.

Car interiors feature across Kentridge’s oeuvre. For example, a car’s interior is the site of the traumatic memory that forms the narrative climax of his 1995 – 96 work, History of the Main Complaint.

Disenchanted with conceptual and minimal European and American art of the 1960s and 1970s, Kentridge delved into art history and found inspiration in the early 20th-century German expressionist work of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and George Grosz, early 20th-century French art and the Soviet filmmakers and designers of propaganda posters. These influences can be felt here in the artist’s humorous critique of excess and wealth – ‘all the nastiness and cruelty and lack of empathy in the political world of Europe in the 1920s and 30s’, as the artist has described it. The influence of satirists, who provided critical commentary on their times and its social issues, such as Honoré Daumier, Francisco Goya and William Hogarth, is also clear here. Though grounded in South Africa, Kentridge’s work resonates in universal ways, exploring the relationship between desire, ethics and responsibility, our changing notion of history and place, and how we construct and interpret these histories.

SOURCES:
https://nladesignvisual.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/william-kentridge-1955/
http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/264.html?page=2

Despite his ongoing exploration of other media, the foundation of Kentridge’s art has always been drawing and printmaking. He began acting, writing, and designing sets for the theatre in the 1970s, and his art has always exuded theatricality – both in form and content. Theatricality lies at the heart of all his work, as does a deep sense of physicality – both of which are strongly evident in this pastel and conté crayon drawing of a voluptuous dancer practising her arabesques as a naked figure in a hat looks on fanning him/herself. The relationship between the two figures is oblique and mysterious. The seated figure looks askance, while the dancer seems preoccupied with the fullness of her own presence and movement. Are they fellow performers rehearsing a scene? Could they be lovers?

Tension is introduced by a third presence – the empty chair, coloured pink (the colour of a blush or a rose or wanting lips), which hints at a third personality in this abstract tango between two protagonists. Whatever the case may be, each pictorial object has its own persona within the sketched limits of the frame or the stage. In this way, the artist draws attention to the stagedness of his own drawing, foregrounding a subtle note of formalism in what initially appears to be a purely figurative work.

One of the joys of Kentridge’s art is its appearance of handcrafted roughness – accompanied by a feeling of ease and flow in the act of drawing itself. ‘I worked for some years as an artist and then I stopped for a few years. When I came back to it and I started working on charcoal drawings, which I hadn’t done before, it was somehow done without the pressure of having to know what it was before the drawing was made. So, that was the moment, I suppose, of allowing myself to not know what I was doing. Or to not know where things would end,’ he told The Economist.

SOURCE:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/12/qa-william-kentridge

This screen print or ‘drawing for projection’ was made by Kentridge as part of Faustus in Africa (1995), a multimedia theatre production featuring puppetry, live acting and animation that he directed in collaboration with Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler’s Handspring Puppet Company (with additional text by Lesego Rampolokeng) and in association with The Market Theatre, Art Bureau (Munich), Kunstfest (Weimar), the Standard Bank National Arts Festival, The Foundation for the Creative Arts and Mannie Manim Productions.

Like Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992) and Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), Faustus in Africa reconsidered a canonical European literary text from an African perspective. Faust trades his soul for a colonist’s open ticket to exploit Africa. ‘The legend of Faust is based on the story of the 16th-century learned scholar who squandered his fortune and then sold his soul to the devil in exchange for additional time to search for the meaning of existence through travel and indulgences. After making his pact with the devil, Handspring’s Faustus goes on a safari. Indulging in elaborate feasts and buying sprees, Faustus attempts to consume all that Africa has to offer. Transposed to Africa, his desires become those of the archetypal greedy colonialist – his victims the African people and their land,’ read the production notes.

This storyboard-style animation sketch features miscellaneous objects placed on graves beneath a tree – presumably as offerings to the ancestors. The semi-abstract shapes of these objects – which are denoted only by their red outlines, as opposed to the tree, which is rendered more in more traditional representational terms – lends them a mystic air. This work’s focus on ancestral rites evidences Kentridge’s interest in trans-generational psychic inheritances, the trauma of history and contemporary archival practices in African contexts.

SOURCE:
http://www.handspringpuppet.co.za/handspring-productions/faustus-in-africa/

Kentridge has written extensively on concepts of landscape and memory, making the connection between the exploitation of the land and of South Africa’s people under apartheid. He has commented on the long tradition of the South African landscape in paintings – in particular the celebratory landscapes of Jan Volschenk (1853 – 1936), and JH Pierneef (1886 – 1957) – referring to their versions of the South African landscape as ‘documents of disremembering’. He has also noted how the landscape of Auschwitz bears little to no trace of the World War II carnage.

On the contrary, Kentridge’s landscapes deliberately lay bare their histories. In his depictions of the mine dumps of the East Rand and the platinum belt, the scarred surface of the land, wrought by civil engineering, is sparsely punctuated by scrubby growth, as well as huge mounds of excavated earth from the mines.

This etching ‘directly [addresses] the process of stripping, depleting and commercialising the space of nature’. Random crooked stakes evidence the manner in which the territory has been staked and claimed for commercial use. The etching has been printed on the page of a ledger book of an early Johannesburg mining company. The text beneath the drawings, either covered or glimpsed, is an important part of the history of the drawing, highlighting the historical complicity of the mining industry in the scarred and ruined landscapes of the present.

SOURCES:
https://nladesignvisual.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/william-kentridge-1955/
http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/21321/lot/213/

Sleeper – Black (1997) is one of the etchings produced as part of the film project Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), which was originally created to form part of the multimedia theatre work, Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), in which Kentridge collaborated with the Handspring Puppet Company.

Produced around the time that South Africa’s new Constitution was coming into effect and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings were exposing evidence of unlawful activity and gross human rights violations, Kentridge’s Sleeper series considers the implications of those revelations and their impact on the bodies and psyches of South Africans.

He drew on French dramatist Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, which premiered in 1896, to reflect on the revelations of the TRC. Into the bloated form of the mad despot Ubu, the body of a man has been inserted – asleep, naked and vulnerable. A range of materials and objects were placed into the soft ground on the copper plate to create the extraordinary range of textures that add visual interest, evoke the passage of time and suggest the flaws and mutilations inscribed onto the human body.

SOURCES:
http://www.straussart.co.za/press/release/2012-09-06-kentridge-s-sleeper-a-unique-working-proof

This etching draws on Kentridge’s sustained experiments in shadow theatre – for years he has deployed shadow figures or dark silhouettes ripped from construction paper and collaged against the patterns of 19th-century atlas maps.

These ‘shadow figure’ works culminated in his video installation, Shadow Procession, which depicts a haunting procession of black puppet-like figures made from cardboard cutouts. The figures, hunched and crippled, move from left to right across the screen, hauling their belongings – donkeys, carts, chairs, sacks, even whole towns on their backs – as if in an exodus. Humans, animals and the indeterminate figures in between carry their burdens, sacks, bundles and houses. Some lead others by the hand, some carry gallows and bodies. Some drag entire neighbourhoods on their backs.

Influenced by the brutality of apartheid, Shadow Procession conveys the drudgery of living amidst prolonged violence. The passage of these figures looks like a classical frieze of anonymous shadows on a collective journey. With its astonishing simplicity, it conveys the displacement and flight of a people. Even though the work is clearly set in the past, no specific historical event is being conjured. Rather, this video installation and related works epitomise the grim memory of all those who have been oppressed and forced to leave their home country.

SOURCE:
http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/59/artist_kentridge.html

This lithograph was made along with the animated film Stereoscope, the eighth in Kentridge’s decade-long series featuring Soho Eckstein, the archetypal white Johannesburg businessman of the post-apartheid era and an alter ego of the artist. The role of drawings in Kentridge’s oeuvre has developed over time. Initially created in service to his films, they gradually took on a more independent life, and in 1992, the artist began showing them separately.

Here, Eckstein is depicted submerged in a pool/bath/reservoir of water, absorbing the sounds emitting from an outsize bullhorn or loud hailer that has been rigged up in the middle of the veld. There is no escape from the assault of the news or propaganda it seems. Eckstein has to cope with the horrifying past of his country, Kentridge has written, and find a line ‘between choosing a more solitary life or being promiscuously social’. But even when Eckstein attempts to relax or retreat into the private realm from the relentlessness public life of the city, he cannot escape the information that blasts forth from the incessant foghorn of history. He wears a hat on his head, which is slightly bowed in a gesture of submission or receptivity.

SOURCE:
http://www.moma.org/collection/works/36774