William Kentridge

Still from William Kentridge's film installation in the Italian pavilion, Venice 2005

"One of the fascinating things about William Kentridge's films is how they let the process show. Because he draws, shoots, erases and shoots again to create his imagery - rather than painting animation cells or digitally developing scenes - I am conscious of his means, even his touch. It was Kentridge's genius to show how the directness of drawing could survive the indirectness of a camera-based art."
- from "William Kentridge" by Janet Koplos, Art in America, December, 2000
- at gregkucera

gregkucera's print listing

I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and certain endings; an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.
— William Kentridge

Kentridge drawing in his studio, Johannesburg ©the artist

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FREUD'S BODY EGO OR MEMORABILIA OF GRIEF
is a psychoanalytic study of the work of artists William Kentridge and Lucian Freud. It draws on the major exhibitions of the past decades together with interviews and includes over one hundred and fifty images in colour. There are also photographs of recent work from William Kentridge's studios in NYC and Johannesburg. The text has a coda on Barnett Newman. Sigmund Freud's letters on art (with previously untranslated passages) appear together with a focus on his clinical and theoretical writings on fetishism. Major European writers like Arendt, Balzac, Beckett, Pessoa, Rilke, Svevo, Tolstoy, Varnhagen, and Zweig, among others, constitute the intellectual horizon.

Some thoughts on painting and on obsolescence by Lucian Freud and William Kentridge