55 - ⊕ WILLIAM KENTRIDGE (SOUTH AFRICAN B.1955)

⊕ WILLIAM KENTRIDGE (SOUTH AFRICAN B.1955) THE LULU PLAYS, ACT III SCENE I & II signed W Kentridge lower right in pencil; numbered Ev 1/20 lower left silkscreen on paper 30.1 x 44.7cm (plate); 43.3 x 58 (sheet); (68.7 x 84.2cm framed) Property from a Private Collection, Cambridge Provenance Acquired by David Carr Fine Art, South Africa Purchased from the above The DinksFãStan Private Collection William Kentridge is a renowned South African artist known for his prints, drawings and animated films. He is best known for a series of hand-drawn animations from the 1990s. To make them, he filmed a single drawing, erased or changed part of it, and filmed it again, giving each change between a quarter of a second and two seconds of screen time until the scene was finished. The drawings left behind, layered like palimpsests, are shown alongside the films as artworks in their own right. His practice also reaches into theatre and opera, where he has worked as art director and overall director, collaborating with puppeteers and other artists on productions that combine drawing and multimedia. Drawing and printmaking have been the foundation of his work since the mid-1970s. Two early groups of prints established his artistic identity: the "Pit" series of monotypes from 1979, and the roughly fifty small etchings of the "Domestic Scenes" from 1980. In 1986, he made charcoal and pastel drawings loosely based on Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera. These depicted a ruined, dystopian urban landscape and showed him moving towards a freer use of space and movement. His 1996–97 portfolio Ubu Tells the Truth drew on Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi and on South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Later, his 2012 Norton Lectures at Harvard, Six Drawing Lessons, examined the studio as a place where meaning is made. Alongside these he produced large Indian-ink drawings of southern African trees on torn and reassembled encyclopaedia pages, pieced together like puzzles. Kentridge has said his marks must come from "something out there in the world," and he sees printmaking as letting the hand lead the brain. The Lulu works grew out of his staging and projection designs for Alban Berg's expressionist opera Lulu, which is based on the German playwright, Frank Wedekind's original plays. That imagery, drawn over dictionary and encyclopaedia pages, recalls the silent cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. In 2015 he worked with Arion Press on the artist's book The Lulu Plays, which contains 67 offset lithographs and separate suites of linocuts. That project led to later standalone print editions and hand-coloured linocuts, including this one.