William Kentridge

Category

Exhibition

Year

1999

Institution

MACBA, Barcelona, Barcelona

Comment

The ensemble, this catalogue and the exhibition document the rich production of work by William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955), and especially show that each one of his activities are a way of returning to the act of drawing, an act the artist has developed into an extremely vivid tool for interpreting our world.Since the end of the 1960's, Kentridge has worked with a large range of media and techniques, from charcoal drawings on paper to etchings, from animated films to acting, set designing and directing numerous theatrical productions."I was never able to flee Johannesburg. The four houses where I lived, my school and the studio were all within a distance of three kilometres. And in the end, my entire work has its roots in this provincial and rather desperate city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but my drawings and films have certainly been enriched and informed by the brutalised society left behind. I am interested in political art, which is to say an art of ambiguity, of contradiction, of incomplete gestures and uncertain ends: an art and a politics where optimism is under control and nihilism is kept at bay." William Kentridge (Source: MACBA)