William Kentridge

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South African artist William Kentridge produces works that exist somewhere between film, drawing and theater and sometimes as a combination of all three. Kentridge’s drawings and stop-motion videos often have a subtle but reflectively political undertone, investigating the cultural dualities of South Africa and the artist’s birth city of Johannesburg. Using the reductive medium of charcoal with only a small amount of blue or red chalk, Kentridge is effectively able to portray narratives while allowing the drawing process to be revealed by erasing and redrawing the object on the same sheet of paper. Since the late nineties, Kentridge has exhibited with museums worldwide. In 2004, the Metropolitan Museum in New York presented a solo show of the artist’s work, which was followed by a premiere of Mozart’s Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute) in 2005 at the Theatre de La Monnaie in Brussels, with Kentridge as the director. The artist had perhaps his largest exhibition to date at the Musee d’art Contemporain in Montreal, and he received a project commission from the Deutsche Bank Guggenheim in Berlin the same year.

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