Above:William Kentridge | Goat 2021
Bronze | Work: 120 x 80 x 150 cm | Edition of 8
Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Glyphs, an exhibition of bronze sculptures from William Kentridge’s ongoing series, alongside the original drawing from his most recent animated film, City Deep. The exhibition is the artist’s first US solo dedicated to sculpture. Glyphs will open from the 24th of November to the 30th of December 2021.
Kentridge’s glyphs form a visual lexicon made of a series of sculptures that represent a collection of everyday objects, symbols or icons, ubiquitous in the artist’s practice. The glyphs started as ink drawings and paper cut-outs, each on a single page of a dictionary. The drawings were transmuted into bronze sculptures, to embody the weight and essence of their shapes on paper.
The glyphs can be arranged in order to construct sculptural sentences and an ever-changing meaning. The drawing City Deep (A Fault to be Discovered Later), included in the exhibition, exemplifies this idea of collages and surrealist narration like a “cadavre esquis”.
City Deep is Kentridge’s most recent film from his Drawings for Projection series. The film, grounded within William’s home city of Johannesburg, can be viewed as a counterpoint to the 1990 film, Mine, which depicts images of the deep-level mining industry. City Deep extends this depiction to the informal, surface-level “zama zama” miners who illegally work decommissioned mines on the edges of the formal mining economy.
Above:William Kentridge | Ring, 2017
Bronze | Work: 70 x 89 x 72 cm | AP 1/1
William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1955. His career has spanned five decades and his work has been shown in major museums, galleries, fairs and biennials around the world since the 1990s, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1997, 2003, 2012), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998, 2010), the Albertina Museum in Vienna (2010), Jeu de Paume in Paris (2010), and the Musée du Louvre in Paris (2010), where he presented Carnets d’Egypte, a project conceived especially for the Egyptian Room.
Kentridge’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was presented at Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Festival d’Aix, and in 2011 at La Scala in Milan, and his production of Shostakovich’s The Nose was seen at The New York Metropolitan Opera in 2010 and again in 2013, traveling to Festival d’Aix and to Lyon in 2011.
The five-channel video and sound installation The Refusal of Time was made for Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany, in 2012; since then it has been seen at MAXXI in Rome, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and in many other cities including Boston, Perth, Kyoto, Helsinki and Wellington.
A substantial survey exhibition of Kentridge’s work opened in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, going on in following years to Porto Alegre, São Paulo, Bogota, Medellin, and Mexico City. In the summer of 2014 Kentridge’s production of Schubert’s Winterreise opened at the Vienna Festival, Festival d’Aix, and Holland Festival. In the fall it opened at the Lincoln Center in New York. Paper Music, a concert of projections with live music by Philip Miller, opened in Florence in September 2014, and was presented at Carnegie Hall in New York in late October 2014. Both the installation The Refusal of Time and its companion performance piece Refuse the Hour were presented in Cape Town in February 2015.
Kentridge’s production of the Alban Berg opera Wozzeck premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and in 2018 his acclaimed performance project The Head & The Load opened at Tate Modern in London, and traveled to Park Avenue Armory in December 2018. In June 2019, A Poem That I Used To Know opened at Kunstmuseum, Basel in Switzerland, which traveled to LaM in Lille in early 2020. Why Should I Hesitate, a major survey show, divided across the Norval Foundation and Zetiz MOCAA, both in Cape Town, opened in late August 2019 and will run until July 2020. In addition, Kentridge’s new opera project, Waiting for the Sibyl, premiered at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in September 2019 and will be seen in several European cities in 2020.
Kentridge is currently working towards major survey exhibitions which are to take place at The Royal Academy in London, and The Broad in LA in 2022.
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