Important South African & International Art, Decorative Arts & Jewellery

Live Auction, 16 March 2015

Important South African and International Art Evening Sale
  • William Kentridge; Untitled (Sketch for Construction of Return)


Lot Estimate
ZAR 350 000 - 500 000

About this Item

South African 1955-
Untitled (Sketch for Construction of Return)

signed and dated '08

charcoal
78 by 57cm excluding frame

Notes

In 2008, William Kentridge directed a production of Claudio Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse at the Teatro La Fenice, a legendary neo-classical opera house in the centre of Venice. To mark the occasion, La Fenice commissioned a site-specific film from the artist. The artist produced a triptych of short films, Breathe, Return and Dissolve, each informed by a different approach to distorting and recomposing an image. The film was projected onto the fire curtain of the stage before the start of Kentridge’s opera as the orchestra tuned their instruments. To coincide with this theatrical spectacle, the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, a century-old Venetian cultural organisation that has previously hosted exhibitions by Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois and Frida Kahlo, amongst others, invited Kentridge to present a new solo exhibition. Titled (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo, his exhibition featured a film installation showing the work projected in La Fenice, seven sculptural pieces featured in Return, as well as drawings and lithographs. Two weeks after Kentridge debuted his three films in Venice, the artist held a parallel exhibition of (REPEAT) from the beginning at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, where this drawing was acquired.
This drawing is integral to the production of Return. The film is based around a series of anamorphic sculptures portraying several figures, including a conductor, singers, Stalin’s portrait and a nose on horseback. Based on drawings and fabricated from wire, paper and cardboard, these atomised sculptures – the artist prefers the description “anti-sculptures”1 – were purposefully made to be filmed and are only coherent from a single vantage. Remarking on the relationship between his drawings and the films they so often service, the artist has describes them as “applied” and “functional” drawings, and “drawings in the service of something else, a film”.2 Far from being residual or leftover elements of the production, they are integral to the logic of the overall project. Indeed, they speak to the very activity Kentridge consciously defines himself by, which, as he stated during the first of his six Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 2012, is drawing.3

1. Kentridge, William (2008) (REPEAT) from the beginning / Da Capo, Milan: Charta. Page 21
2. O’Toole, Sean (2005), personal interview with the artist, Johannesburg, 5 July.
3. Kentridge, William (2014) Six Drawing Lessons, London: Harvard University Press. Page 4

Literature

William Kentridge, Angela Vettese, Francesca Pasini and Jane Taylor (2008) William Kentridge (REPEAT) From the Beginning / Da capo, Milan: Edizioni Charta. Illustrated on page 99.

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