William Kentridge: Making Prints: Selected Editions 1998–2021

William Kentridge
Making Prints: Selected Editions 1998–2021

16 March – 17 April 2021

A selection of print works by William Kentridge from over two decades is now on view at Marian Goodman Gallery New York in our Third Floor Gallery.  

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Kentridge’s engagement with printmaking has been integral to his artistic practice and spans his entire career. He has experimented with a broad range of media, from etching to lithography, aquatint, drypoint, photogravure and woodcut, for over four decades. The exhibition’s selection of prints, from 1998 until now, was chosen by Kentridge and includes themes and media that feel particularly enduring and relevant to the artist. In this exhibition, several subjects emerge: sketches that explore a universal archive of ideas; procession, migration and exodus; how history is written; nature and landscape as memory; uses of the absurd, and more.

Kentridge began printmaking as a student of art and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in the early to mid-1970’s, making screen-printed posters for trade unions, student protests and theater companies, which then led to teaching etching at the Johannesburg Art Foundation from 1976-1978. From that time onward, printmaking’s legacy as a democratic ­­art object and vehicle for satire and social change–from Callot to Hogarth to Goya–is as intrinsic to its own history as it is to Kentridge’s. As a South African coming of age under apartheid, he identified a need for expression and experimentation, drawn to the traditions of Beckmann, Dix, Kollwitz, late Dürer and others.  Marking or inking, incision and refinement of line, duration and process—the temporal aspect of creating a body of work around layers of a subject—are aspects that allow him to return again and again to printmaking.

Lexicon is the newest group of prints from 2021; they are shown here for the first time. These prints evolved from work by the same title made of sculptural glyphs in bronze. Based on typographic characters that aggregate into ‘paragraphs’ of icons, the five etching and drypoint works included in the exhibition are drawn from a panoply of motifs in Kentridge’s earlier works and notebooks, and are a successor to his procession works. Emergency, Apothecary, Promenade, Forest, Parade summon anthropomorphic bodies activated in time, transmuting from object to figure and vice versa in a state of metamorphosis. Alluding to the aforementioned glyphs which represent the fragmentary nature of thought, they are extracts from an archive of personal images that connect to memory and to the will of ‘what wishes to be drawn.’

A group of woodcut prints from 2016-2018 relate to Triumphs and Laments, Kentridge’s monumental frieze of images displayed over 500-meters along Rome’s Tiber River (2016).  History as a tale of victors and vanquished—and how history is written—are pervasive themes that Kentridge explores. The palimpsest of history—the pageant of ancient and modern characters from Roman lore who will recess into the sediments of time—is inherent to the frieze itself. Invoking the ancient ritual of a Roman triumph underscores what those celebrations omitted: the perspective of the defeated.

The set of 30 etchings for Nose, 2006-2009, and Wittgenstein’s Rhinoceros, 2007, and later XA XA XA, Portable Monuments and Eight Figures, 2010, were all made leading up to, or concurrent with, Kentridge’s direction of Shostakovich’s The Nose at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2010. Using a mixture of three techniques (sugar lift, drypoint, engraving), etchings for The Nose were created originally as a sketchbook of ideas offering different thoughts. In advance of preparations for the opera, Kentridge conducted research to conceive of a visual language for the production, rooting himself in Suprematism and Constructivism in order to craft a formal vocabulary for its staging. Exploring the art and ideology of Soviet history and the despotism of Stalin’s regime allowed parallels to be drawn to the complex situation of South Africa. The aesthetic platform chosen became a way to merge ideas, integrating Gogol’s short story (1830s) on which the opera is based, with research into Russian iconography of the 1920s, the time when Shostakovich wrote the opera.

Kentridge imagines ‘the incomprehensibility of the world through the aesthetics of the absurd—the extraordinary nonsense hierarchy of apartheid in South Africa made one understand the absurd not as a peripheral mistake at the edge of a society but as a central point of construction, so the absurd always, for me is a species of realism rather than a species of joke or fun. That’s why one can take the joke of 'The Nose' very seriously.’