Seeing Double

Category

Exhibition

Year

2008

Institution

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Comment

The exhibition is structured primarily around the discourse of vision and optics and centered around a new eight-minute anamorphic film, titled What Will Come (2006), which takes its title from a Ghanaian proverb: "What will come has already come."On view will be drawings, prints, and stereoscopic images which form the basis of the film What Will Come and in which Kentridge continues his exploration of optics and the construction of seeing. In taking sight as a subject, it is double vision, the formal construction of how we construct images in our brain which intrigues Kentridge. This is revealed through a set of eight stereoscopic cards, Double Vision, six stereoscopic photogravures, and drawings, all of which take on three dimensions as the viewer 'completes' the work with a stereoscopic device; as well as anamorphic drawings-- images which appear distorted, but are corrected in mirrored in cylinders. Reference to optics have been an ongoing concern in Kentridge's work since, for example, the film Stereoscope (1999) in which "Soho's mind bursts into two as he doubles up and becomes divided even from himself –unable to achieve the stereoscopic vision by which we normally see three-dimensionally as our mind fuses together images from both eyes", or since Kentridge's group of anamorphic drawings based on Shadow Procession figures in 2000.Kentridge says, "The bulk of the work in the exhibition involves seeing twice. Seeing the image in one form, and then reconstructing the image either in a mirror, or though another optical device. The anamorphic film "What Will Come", was made for an Italian exhibition, "Emergency", and has as its core, images and music from the Italian Abyssinian war of 1935. Part of that exhibition was an invitation to do four drawings to be reproduced in the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. The newspapers started as small sugarlift etchings. From these small etchings, large drawings were done, and these large scale drawings were then reduced to the size of a newspaper."The South Gallery will also include a series of new works: large watercolors, equestrian sculptures, collage prints, and a new tapestry related to Kentridge's work-in-progress, a forthcoming production of Shostakovich's opera The Nose, which will premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, New York in 2010.The new graphics in this exhibition are related to different projects from the past year: both the opera The Magic Flute and the mini-theater installation Black Box; as well as the film What Will Come Come;, and Shostakovich's The Nose, derived from the short story by Nikolai Gogol.(Source: Marian Goodman Gallery)