Notes

This lot is part of a limited edition set.

Evidence of flowers and trees are visible throughout William Kentridge’s landscape drawings and print experiments from the past four decades, but over the last ten years they have become pronounced subjects. The recurrence of flowers, especially irises, peonies, and lilies, partly stems from the transformative pleasure of drawing them, the artist has said. But flowers also reference the artist’s fascination with French modernist painter Édouard Manet, who Kentridge in a 2015 lecture described as the “most sublime painter of peonies and lilacs; but also painter of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, a painting that places him in the company of Goya.”¹ Manet’s capacity to move between flowers and politics, the studio and the world, fascinates Kentridge. He expanded on this in a 2016 interview with London’s Guardian newspaper. Like Manet, he said, “I’ve never felt I needed to distinguish strongly between work that was about the history of art and work about the history of the country. It all flows into the studio and different parts get picked up at different moments.”² An edition of this print depicting elegant white lilies in peak bloom was exhibited in Paris in 2021 alongside other recent prints of flowers.

^1. Lecture first delivered at Design Indaba, Cape Town, February 2015. Published in Iwona Blazwick and Sabine Breitwieser (eds) (2016) William Kentridge: Thick Time. London, Whitechapel Gallery, page 198.
^2. Nicholas Wroe (2016) ‘Out of South Africa: how politics animated the art of William Kentridge’, The Guardian, 10 September: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/10/out-of-south-africa-how-politics-animated-the-art-of-william-kentridge

Provenance

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Marian Goodman, Paris, Finally Memory Yields, 18 October to 27 November 2021.