Provenance

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Private Collection.

Notes

William Kentridge’s The Nose sculpture grew directly out of his production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1928 opera The Nose, which he was commissioned to stage by the Metropolitan Opera in New York (premiered in 2010).

The opera is based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 satirical short story The Nose, in which a St Petersburg official wakes one morning to find his nose missing – only to discover it wandering the city in the guise of a higher-ranking bureaucrat. Both Gogol’s text and Shostakovich’s opera are deeply absurd, mocking the hierarchies and social pretensions of Russian society.

Kentridge was fascinated by themes of fragmentation, dislocation, and the comic potential of body parts acquiring agency. For the opera, he created a visual world combining projections, animated drawings, collage, and set pieces. From this process emerged the bronze sculptures – noses with legs, striding or strutting like little characters. They stand as autonomous artworks, yet carry the absurdist humour and biting critique of power, bureaucracy, and identity that animate the opera.