Notes

This drawing comes from William Kentridge’s 2011 35mm stop-motion film Other Faces, which forms part of his larger body of filmic work Drawing for Projections (1989–2011). In his process driven technique, Kentridge draws and reworks images by erasing and overworking a drawing, and filming its progress. The present lot is a charcoal drawing of a large dark screen standing imposingly in a run-down urban landscape. This is the abandoned Top Star drive-in movie theatre, which was famously located atop a Johannesburg mine dump (the old mine headgear is visible in the distance in other works from the series). The filmic motif of a cinema screen is a common image in the artist’s oeuvre, reflecting his interest in the mechanics of vision and the processes of representation, seen also in his depictions of telescopes and film cameras. The mine dump is also a recurring metaphor for Kentridge, as both a quintessential symbol of the mining city of Johannesburg and his sharp critique of the capitalization of land and bodies.

Provenance

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Private Collection, Johannesburg.

Exhibited

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, William Kentridge/Other Faces, 10 November to 17 December 2011.

Museo Amparo, Puebla, William Kentridge: Fortuna, 4 July to 5 Oct 2015, also shown at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, and in Brazil and Colombia.

Literature

Lilian Tone (ed) William Kentridge: Fortuna, London: Thames & Hudson, illustrated in colour on page 228.