William Kentridge

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE:

 ’I AM NOT ME, THE HORSE IS NOT MINE’
11 DECEMBER 2008 – 8 MARCH 2009

 

Kentridge is my favourite South African artist, I think I wrote about him in every single one of my school art essays, but have never actually seen his work besides photographs of it, which is why I am so excited that the Iziko South African National Gallery is hosting an exhibition of his work, the first in Cape Town since, 2002. Seeing an art work, the actual thing, cannot be compared to seeing replica’s, I shall be there on the 11th as it opens, you should be there too!

“William Kentridge could probably be ranked as the most important living South African artist. He has been recognised as one of the most significant artists in the world, his innovative style and haunting images transcending the South African context to speak to humanity

His art addresses the nature of human emotions and memory, as well as the relationship between desire, ethics and responsibility. He explores the possibilities of poetry in contemporary society and yet provides a satirical commentary on that society. In this first exhibition in Cape Town since his celebrated retrospective at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2002, Kentridge presents a multi-channel projected work entitled, ‘I am not me, the horse is not mine’ (2008). Based on ‘The Nose’ (1837) by Nikolai Gogol, and part of the process of developing his production of Shostakovich’s ‘The Nose’, commissioned for the Metropolitan Opera in 2010, it was first presented to international acclaim at the Biennale of Sydney in June this year. The work stems from an ongoing interest in the roots and trajectory of modernism: a mixture of the absurd, the self-reflective (and the ‘self-divided’), and the forms of fragmentation that one associates with modernism – its crushing in Russia in the 1930s and the long-term trajectory of the terrors of hierarchy.”