Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Starting on 8.31, the São Paulo State Art Gallery (Pinacoteca) will host the show William Kentridge: fortuna (William Kentridge: fortune), in partnership with Instituto Moreira Salles and Fundação Iberê Camargo. This is Kentridge’s first-ever major monographic exhibition in South America, featuring 38 drawings, 35 films and animations, 184 engravings, 31 sculptures, and two video installations made by the artist between 1989 and 2012.

Curated by Lilian Tone, the solo show highlights the variety and strength of the South African artist’s work, emphasizing his unconventional creative process. The Drawings for Projection series, comprising 10 short films and regarded as the foundation to Kentridge’s oeuvre, will be shown in full for the first time, alongside 23 drawings made during the films’ production. For this piece, Kentridge has said he used a “stone age film” technique where every change effected to each drawing, in charcoal or pastel, was filmed frame by frame. Thus being, not only do the successive modifications and redefinitions manifest themselves in the piece’s perception, they also incorporate themselves to the image. "Kentridge’s process is conveyed as a plausible illusion, in which the artist’s recurrent themes – a constellation of iconographic elements – are built up, deconstructed, and reassembled before our eyes. We see a cat undergo multiple changes: it turns into a gas mask, a megaphone, and then a bomb,” the show’s curator writes. In order to construct his work, Kentridge utilizes actual elements, references to current locations, situations, and events. The strongest of these elements is the social memory of South Africa and its Apartheid history, more specifically in the city of Johannesburg – where Kentridge was born, lives, and works.

After having influenced artists in South Africa for over ten years, Kentridge gained international acclaim in the mid-1990s. His work has since featured in shows and performances at museums, galleries and theaters worldwide, including the Documenta, in Kassel, Germany (1997, 2003, 2012), the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2005); in solo shows at the MoMA, in New York (1998, 2010), the Albertina Museum, in Vienna (2010), the Jeu de Paume, in Paris (2011), the Louvre, in Paris (2010), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York (2005); and in performances at the Metropolitan Opera, in New York (2010), and the La Scala, in Milan (2011).

Service:

William Kentridge: fortuna
From 8.31 to 11.10.2013
Curator: Lilian Tone
São Paulo State Art Gallery (Pinacoteca) | Praça da Luz, 2, São Paulo - SP