Aspire Art Auctions’ Ravelle Pillay with William Kentridge drawing from the film Stereoscope’
£300,000 WILLIAM KENTRIDGE work
Video of work and interview with artist: http-//ubu.com/film/ken#26C662D
An important work by top contemporary artist William Kentridge whose work has been featured by the Tate and showcased on the banks of the River Tiber in Rome, in the last two years, is for sale with leading South African auction house, Aspire Art Auctions on October 28th.
Ruarc Peffers, Director of Aspire Art Auctions in South Africa, says of the work they are currently selling: “This work by William Kentridge stems from his early Drawings for Projection for which the artist is most celebrated and which was the driving force behind his initial rise to international fame and prominence.”
William Kentridge is the famous son of a famous father, Sidney Kentridge, who defended Nelson Mandela in the infamous Treason Trial, thus saving his life.
The business-suited figure in the drawing, Soho Eckstein, is William Kentridge’s much discussed alter ego, a corporate figure linked to affluent South Africans’ exploitation of the sub-continent. Over the course of the films, but in many ways culminating in this one, it is revealed that Soho Eckstein, the arch-capitalist magnate, and Felix Teitelbaum, his naked nemesis and lover of Mrs. Eckstein, are in fact one and the same.
The drawing represents one of the critical moments in the film where Soho realises with sorrow the divided nature of his identity, and feels, in the midst of the political tumult going on in the world outside, totally alone in an empty room.
This moody drawing from the film, Stereoscope – Double Page, Soho in Two Rooms was produced in 1999. The charcoal and pastel work on paper, signed, 120 x 160 cm is estimated to sell for £230,000 (R4.5m) to £300,000 (R6m). The drawing from Stereoscope is one of the largest of 65 drawings that Kentridge used to make the 8 minute and 22 second animated film that was first shown, together with a selection of drawings, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in April 1999.
Kentridge is celebrated internationally as a powerful artistic voice out of Africa. At the Tate Modern recently his new work ‘The Head & The Load’ showcased the significant contribution of African men and women during WW1. The world premiere of this major new work was performed against the dramatic backdrop of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. William Kentridge’s latest project combines music, dance, film projections, mechanised sculptures and shadow play to create an imaginative landscape on an epic scale. It tells the untold story of the hundreds of thousands of African porters and carriers who served in British, French and German forces during the First World War.
In another stunning international project his work ‘Triumphs and Laments, a monumental frieze that featured 80 images, ran alongside the river Tiber in Rome and was described as being “like an unravelled triumphal column”.
In the year in which he made this film, Kentridge said of his method: “I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing, the contingent way that images arrive in the work, lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world. It is in the strangeness of the activity itself that can be detected judgment, ethics and morality.”
Historian and academic, Matthew Kentridge (William’s brother) has written, in the early Drawings for Projection, that Soho was “the embodiment of wealth and greed, arch-capitalist in his privileged world, fat to bursting on the proceeds of exploitation”.[i] This world is represented in the chaos of communication systems, manic numbers, and various forms of interpersonal abuse that invade Soho’s room on the left. From around the time of the film The History of the Main Complaint of 1996, however, Soho began to express remorse for his role in an unjust system and attempted to withdraw from this world: this space is represented on the right of the drawing.
Stereoscope was made during the time of the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that dealt mainly with political crimes under Apartheid but paved the way for big business to acknowledge complicity and guilt.
For further information please contact Julian Roup on Tel: +44 (0)7970 563958
Email: [email protected]
More sale information from Aspire Art Auctions
Phone.: +27 11 243 5243.
Email: [email protected]