bronze and oil paint

Artwork date: 2016
Signature details: signed, numbered FP and stamped with the Workhorse foundry mark on the underside
Exhibited: Goodman Gallery, Online, William Kentridge: Something Has Been Postponed, 29 April to 19 May, another example from the edition exhibited. Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work, 25 August 2019 to March 2020, another example from the edition exhibited. Goodman Gallery, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2016, another example from the edition exhibited.

(1)

51 x 33 x 31 cm

Notes:

The recent extensive retrospective exhibitions of William Kentridge’s work in Cape Town, at the Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation, were the largest such exhibitions staged in Africa. They did valuable work in not only establishing his significance as a global contemporary artist, but in contextualising his ideas, methods and oeuvre. In the exhibition of his sculptural work staged at the Norval Foundation, William Kentridge: Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture, Kentridge’s intellectual debt to and preoccupation with European avant-gardism is clear. In a typically engaged and intellectual way, Kentridge situates this avant-garde moment within the parallel process of colonial exploitation which impacted Africa as a whole – the subject of his massive multimedia production The Head and the Load, from which the title of these exhibitions is drawn. At times his sculptural interventions take the form of ready-mades or fully-functioning automata, drawing on the iconography of artist Marcel Duchamp or the Futurists. Elsewhere he deploys a series of everyday objects familiar from his visual lexicon – cameras, megaphones, a corkscrew – and scales them up enormously, imbuing the objects with outsize significance reminiscent of the techniques of Cubism and Dada. This repertoire also includes what Kentridge refers to as the rebus – originally a visual puzzle derived from psychoanalysis which was a technique and strategy of the early Surrealists. Rows of small bronze sculptures are arranged almost syntactically to provide the effect. Three Sisters (2016), take this sculptural playfulness one step further. It seems anomalous that these works, showing clear affinities with the Rebus sculptures and with the Polychrome Heads exhibited the year before they were created, would be shown as part of the largely two dimensional work on the exhibition iteration at the Zeitz MOCAA. But despite the fact that they are cast as bronze busts, they are meticulously crafted and painted in a trompe l’oeil style to look like they are made of wood, cardboard and fabric, thus having more in common perhaps with the other painterly works and drawings among which they were exhibited. The works each take the form of a human torso, the heads of which are transformed into a propeller fan, a cone dial and a cubic box. In these delightful and beautifully detailed and realised works, Kentridge’s themes of automata and technological transformation of the human, so beloved of the avant-gardes, continues. ,foundry proof, from an edition of 9 + 3AP