William Kentridge: Colliding Worlds, Crashing Systems

T he South African artist William Kentridge is among the few who have not only taken on almost every medium – drawing, animation, film, tapestry, sculpture and opera – but has also done so with great success. The son of two prominent anti-apartheid lawyers (his father defended Nelson Mandela and represented the family of Stephen Biko), much of his work reflects on his experiences of growing up in the shadow of the apartheid regime and in doing so, reaches into the darkest corners the human psyche.

Throughout Kentridge’s four decade career, drawing has been the starting point, how everything begins. In essence, it’s a form of thinking. As his ideas mutate and swerve, charcoal – the artist’s primary material – allows him to rub out and start again while the smoky remnants of his marks cling spectrally to the surface.

Nature Morte (Long Shot) and Nature Morte (Close Up) were both made in 1986, two years after Kentridge returned to making art following a three-year hiatus, during which he studied theatre under Jacques Lecoq in Paris and then worked as an art director on television and film projects in Johannesburg. The bracketed denotations in the titles make reference to this cinematic training while also signalling the future direction of his practice (Kentridge started animating his drawings soon after).

Meanwhile, Nature Morte is both an ironic nod to the still life genre and a play on ‘dead nature', the literal translation from French. Both works are charged with a sense of urgency and chaos in which the boundaries between seemingly opposing subject matter – wrecked, crumpled cars and palatial architecture – are blurred (quite literally smudged) by the artist’s hand. This is especially evident in Nature Morte (Close Up) where a grand, cavernous room appears to be almost collapsing inwards, returning to dust.

According to Sotheby’s specialists, the drawings follow a series that, ‘transposed the “glitterati” of the South African elite into the trappings of Weimar-era Germany.'

In this light, the collision is not just spatial, but also political and artistic (two sides of the same coin for Kentridge). Through precarious, trembling charcoal lines, the violence of apartheid is brought crashing into the world of the ruling classes, just as Kentridge himself was on the brink of breaking through the barriers of artistic discipline to find new, ever-evolving modes for creative expression.

Past Auction

Contemporary Day Auction

15 October 2022 | 1:00 PM BST | London