William Kentridge – Yesterday’s Good Idea *SOLD*

William Kentridge - Yesterday's Good Idea - 2016   SOLD OUT

William Kentridge - Yesterday's Good Idea - 2016To accompany his major exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, William Kentridge has a created a variable edition of 44 collaged works. For Kentridge this edition is an ‘objet trouve’, comprised of separate drawings from two recent projects, which were pinned to the artists studio wall. The ink splash is from his recent opera Lulu and the slogan from Kentridge’s Notes Towards A Model Opera, a project on the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The ink splash recurs frequently in Kentridge’s work, both animated in his films and in his works on paper. For Kentridge gesture acts as narrative. Always monochrome, the mark is a character from traditional Chinese calligraphy, an expression of zen mindfulness, or the distraction of spilt coffee.

Kentridge often uses repositories of information like dictionaries or encyclopedias as the background for his prints and drawings. Printed onto individual pages of ledger paper, dated from the 1920’s, each work is subtly different and features minutiae of calculations, marking the slow progression of advancing time.

Kentridge’s epigrammatic slogans recall those used during Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution to stir the masses to thought and action. Typically serious and playful, Kentridge’s edition mingles the absurd with the coherent; the incongruity of the ink splash, reproduced as a carefully printed woodcut, the ledger notes quietly asserting exactness, with the lament for “Yesterday’s good idea”.

Medium: Woodcut and collage with Ledger paper and aluminum pins onto Somerset velvet 300gsm
Size: 65 x 50.5 cm.
Variable edition of 44,
Signed and numbered recto.
Price: £2,500   (Members £2,250.00)

This limited edition William Kentridge print is available at Whitechapel Gallery