William Kentridge

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 2005

Gstaad, Chalet Saqqârah, William Kentridge: Monumental Installation - Memo, February 24, 2006

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of light handling and wear along the edges of each element. There are faint undulations to some of the larger sheets. There are smudges of charcoal on the reverse of various three-dimensional elements, which is inherent to the work and the artist's method of working. The DVD is in good working order.
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William Kentridge's monumental installation Memo is a collaborative project created with artist friends Deborah Bell and Robert Hodgins. The work, described by Kentridge as “a Kafka comedy in which simple office objects first escape from and finally overwhelm a middle-aged functionary,” was inspired by bureaucratic chaos and Hodgins’s depressed mood. In the video, Hodgins portrays the fruitless efforts of a defeated businessman attempting to control his frenetic office, leaving him paralyzed and anonymous. The character’s struggle to avoid being enveloped by an aggressive environment is a straightforward and powerful allegory that addresses how restrictions of time and space can deflate the human spirit.

According to Kentridge, it is necessary to “find your very direct personal point of entry into each drawing or set of images of film. If that’s done diligently enough, it will also make sense beyond your immediate circle." The artist's videos are inspired by his personal experiences, which allow them to resonate universally with the audience.

Entering the art scene in the 1980s, Kentridge has made racial segregation and oppression, rampant in his native country of South Africa, a central theme in his artistic output, and has included everything from animation to set design to acting. In Kentridge’s animations, charcoal drawings play a significant role. As seen in Memo, the artist often navigates the space between drawing and film, believing that drawing is “… a slow-motion version of thought... The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning.”

Music is a key element that Kentridge utilizes to create specific moods and convey emotion more powerfully. In the present video, composer Phillip Miller renders a melancholy score to accompany the video’s dancing duel between the human body and the drawn line.

William Kentridge was educated at the University Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa and has exhibited internationally in major venues such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at the Venice Biennale in Italy. The artist has won numerous international awards and has been included in over 100 exhibitions–including a projection in Times Square. In 2010, William Kentridge was approached by the Metropolitan Opera in New York to design the stage and set of Shostakovich's famed opera "The Nose"; the resulting work, including the grandiose stage, the sets and videos that animated the staging, was one of the Metropolitan Opera’s most acclaimed productions of recent seasons. In Memo, Kentridge thus combines all of his passions melding a powerful installation created from numerous intensively worked drawings, an animated video along with an emotive musical composition, into the ultimate work.