charcoal and pastel

Artwork date: 1991
Signature details: signed and dated
Exhibited: Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection, 21 February to 14 March 1992. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and South African National Gallery, Cape Town, William Kentridge, 2001–2003.
Literature: Godby, M. (1992). William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection. Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery, catalogue number 25. Boris, S.; Cameron, D. and Benezra, N. (2001). William Kentridge. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art and New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, illustrated on p.19. cf. Tone, L (ed.). (2013). William Kentridge Fortuna. London: Thames and Hudson, similar drawings from the film illustrated on pp.150–151.

(1)

74.5 x 90 cm

Purchased from Goodman Gallery, 1992. Another drawing from the film, Mine, is in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.

Notes:

Rarely does such an important early drawing by William Kentridge become available to the market. Drawing from Mine was first exhibited at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in 1992, where it was acquired by the current owner. It was loaned to the Kentridge exhibition which toured major museums in the United States before ‘coming home’ to the South African National Gallery in 2003 – the first museum exhibition for the artist in his home country.Mine is the third in the series entitled 9 Films for Projection. As part of the initial 4 Films set (along with Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old; Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris and Monument) it was acquired by the Tate Gallery, London; the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, U.S.A.What makes this particular drawing, one of about 18 made for the film, so significant, is its pivotal position in the construction of the film’s narrative. Kentridge speaks, in a documentary film entitled Drawing the Passing, about his dilemma of how to connect the upper world of Soho, mining magnate, with the nether world on the mine and miners. He wrestled with this for some time until, one morning while making his coffee, it came to him that the coffee plunger was the device that could penetrate the surface and run from the cafetière to the mineshaft.Kentridge has made drawing, that most ancient and simple of media, his signature medium. He has pointed out that it is rarely an idea but rather the desire to draw which is his starting point.[1] Through repeated mark-making and erasure, which is filmed with a stop-frame camera, his drawings are animated to become films.As Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has stated so eloquently in the first monograph[2] on the artist: “His art is an expressive and personal attempt to address the nature of human emotions and memory, the relationship between desire, ethics and responsibility. … An elegiac art that explores the possibilities of poetry in contemporary society, it also provides a vicious, satirical commentary on that society. It posits a way of seeing life as process rather than as fact, and constantly questions the meaning of artistic practice in today’s world”.

Emma Bedford

Sources:

[1] Benezra, N. (2001). ‘William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection’ in Boris, S.; Cameron, D. and Benezra, N. William Kentridge. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art and New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, p. 12.

[2] Christov-Bakargiev, C. (1998). William Kentridge. Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, p.9.