Works by the South African born artist, William Kentridge (b.1955) were recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Having his installations in such a prestigious venue only highlights the significance and enduring qualities of an artist, who for almost six decades has lived through intense political and social changes.
Working from his studio in Johannesburg, Kentridge was approached by curator and art essayist Lilian Tone to create a singular exhibition for South America. The monograph entitled ‘Fortuna’ – which explores Kentridge’s diverse visual expressions – came into effect.
Hosted by the Art Museum of the Banco de la República, ‘Fortuna’ (Fortune) encompasses works by Kentridge from 1989 to 2012. The exhibition presents 31 sculptures, 32 drawings, 26 short films and animations, 11 engravings, as well as two video installations.
Audiences to this landmark exhibition in Bogotá will have an opportunity to get in contact with the artist’s exploration of diverse mediums, his transformation of scenes into movement and his ability to make things randomly appear and disappear.
Every item strives to make an emotional connection with the audience. The political overtones, which permeate Kentridge’s work, make use of landscape, memory and the social history of his native country. One rooted deeply in the legacy of apartheid and colonialism.
At age six, Kentridge first came upon a series of photographs of the Sharpeville Massacre, the killings that galvanized an anti-apartheid movement in 1960s South Africa. Ever since this first encounter as a child with “shocking images,” Kentridge has mastered, in the words of a New Yorker art critic “one of our period’s greatest challenges: how to create an art of cultural authority, one that takes the moral measure of our time.”
But Kentridge also maintains an undercurrent of humor and fantasy in his work. His scope expands to universal themes of artistic representation and memory. The artist moves on his own moral compass and has adopted ‘Fortune’ as one of his guiding visual principles. He describes it as “something different from the cold statistical randomness that, nonetheless, falls outside the range of rational control.” His animated films based on charcoal drawings, as well as other creations, such as collages and stage presentations, stay clear of the “political art” tag which can be self-aggrandizing and archaic. Kentridge relates to the world of cinema and theatre because he also worked as actor, screenwriter and director.
Kentridge moves freely between mediums, telling a story on every canvas or projected ray of light. The artist gained widespread recognition in 2001 with a retrospective at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. He also had another New York moment when he designed sets for a 2007 Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute.’
Kentridge’s work is a personal and expressive attempt to address the wide range of human emotions: from desire, to ethics, and responsibility. He also deals with ill-treatment and suffering, guilt and confession, domination and emancipation in the late 20th century post-colonial context.
The central axes of ‘Fortuna’ are a series of animated films that Kentridge created with an original technique. He starts by doing drawings with charcoal and pastel, adding and deleting forms, and working over them again and again. Each stage of the process is filmed for a few seconds with a 16 mm camera, thus displaying the passage of time and the stratification of memory, leaving exposed on the drawings the production process.
William Kentridge has performed since 1979 numerous solo and group exhibitions in Britain, Norway, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Australia. He has been present at the Sydney Biennial as well as in Istanbul, Havana, and Johannesburg. He has exhibited in the InklusionExclusion (Graz, 1996), Camp 6, the Spiral Village (1996) and Città Na- tura (1997), as well as at Documenta X in Kassel (1997), and the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (1998).
After July 7th, when the exhibition closes in Bogotá, it opens to audiences at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellín.
‘Fortuna’ / Museo de Arte BanRep Calle 11 No. 4-41
