Notes

Printed by Jack Shirreff and Andrew Smith, 107 Workshop. Published by David Krut Fine Art, London, collection of the artist, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

In the early 1990s, David Krut, a South African print dealer then living in London, introduced William Kentridge to influential atelier master printmaker Jack Shirreff.¹ Based in Wiltshire, Shirreff was well known for working with distinguished British artists like Joe Tilson and Howard Hodgkin. Throughout the 1990s Kentridge frequently travelled to Shirreff’s 107 Workshop to work on large-scale copperplate etchings. Reeds is part of a highly collectable series of Shirreff-printed etchings that includes Head (1993), General (1993-98) and the Sleeper series (1997). Strauss & Co has successfully handled all these prints.

The subject of Reeds is a landscape reminiscent of Johannesburg’s southern peri-urban fringes. This ravaged landscape was crucial to Kentridge’s development as a draughtsman in the mid-1980s. In 1995, Kentridge worked on a series of landscape drawings based on engravings illustrating the accounts of European explorers to Africa. ‘I was interested partly in the translations, the temporal and geographic dislocations, that happen in the journey from explorers’ sketches to the vision of Africa elaborated as these sketches were translated by professional engravers in London,’ expanded Kentridge on the making of Reeds. ‘These images then returned to South Africa, where they appeared in the second-hand bookshops of Johannesburg. Reeds was derived from a detail of one such engraving. However, the project was as much about scale as about the image itself; I was working with copper – usually a medium for precise small work – in a rough manner at the large scale of my ‘colonial landscapes’ drawings.’²

Originally priced at $1,800, Reeds was well received upon publication. ‘Kentridge fashions a fantastic landscape that combines the dusty high veldt in his native land with a pond in which reeds grow and a few scratchy drypoint figures float,’ noted the specialist New York journal On Paper. ‘In the distance, scaffolds and posts vaguely suggestive of industry – perhaps mining – dot the horizon. The print is mainly black and white except for a pink dotted line that traverses the centre and several pink rings, as if the whole is being charted for surveyance.’³

^1. David Krut Projects website, https:// davidkrutprojects.com/artists/18059/williamkentridge, accessed 20 May 2024.
^2. William Kentridge (2006) William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, page 54.
^3. – (1997) ‘Working Proof’, On Paper, 1(3): January – February, page 41.

Literature

— (1997) 'Working Proof', On Paper, 1(3): January – February, page 41.

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen (2006) William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, illustrated on page 54.

Lillian Tone (ed) (2013), William Kentridge Fortuna, London: Thames and Hudson, illustrated in colour on page 99.