William Kentridge

(born 1955)

Colonial Landscape - Waterfall, 1995-1996

Footnotes

Provenance
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa;
Private Collection, London;
Acquired from the above by the current owner.

Exhibited
Rome, Cittá/ Natura: mostra internazionale di Arte Contemporanea' , 21 April - 23 June, 1997.

Literature
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, (Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1998), p. 182 (illustrated)
William Kentridge, 1997, CD-ROM, (Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, reproduced along with various images of drawings and graphics)

The present lot is one of several drawings created by William Kentridge between 1995-1996 for his Colonial Landscape series. The series came after the theatre production, Faustus in Africa (1994), where Kentridge looked at depictions of Southern African landscapes in the era of colonisation. For example, the 1891 publication Africa and Its Exploration: As Told by its Explorers by Mungo Park, David Livingstone and others featured several engravings of idealistic scenes in Southern Africa. The engravings were produced and translated by professional engravers in London and were also reproduced in The Illustrated London News.

The studies of Victoria Falls by Thomas Baines (1820-1875) are arguably comparable to Kentridge's Waterfalls from his Colonial Landscape series. In the early 1860s Baines produced a handful of sketches and oil paintings from his expedition along the Zambezi to Victoria Falls. These images were romanticised and idealistic visions of the Southern African landscape, that can be argued as often disguising the exploitative nature and brutality behind colonial rule.

The imagery referred to here has undergone manifold technical steps in its production from sketch to engraving, all under the colonial, romanticised gaze encompassed by its creators. Parallel to this, the images circulated in Great Britain but were also redistributed back to Southern Africa. Kentridge has admitted to being fascinated with this geographic migration of colonial imagery, stating "I was interested partly in the translations, the temporal and geographic dislocations that happen...". Thus, the Colonial Landscape series became much more than a simple critique of colonialism.

The works in this series were all created on high-quality, handmade Korean paper with deckled edges at the upper and lower margins. It's rare to find a part of the paper that hasn't been worked in with charcoal, which typifies the dense style that bleeds across the entire sheet and masterfully utilises the qualities of the charcoal, including the smudging and erasure that are evident so often in his work.

"But if there hadn't been that first almost sensual pleasure in what it is to be working with that charcoal dust, that you can put into the spew of a waterfall, and the way lines in an engraving or in a drawing are like the lines of the sediment of a rock, and the way the rock meets the idea of a drawing or a graphic mark halfway, and the way the erasure works and a lot of other things – and, yes, obviously it relates to colonial images of Africa, but it's also a treat. A form in which I could let myself draw the beautiful, big landscapes, rather than the bleak, flat Highveld landscape."

Within this landscape Kentridge includes a large, red circle with associated red marks which dominate the page and forces the viewers gaze inwards. "The new red marks are both beacons erected in the landscape and the surveyor's theodolite markings of the image in the viewfinder". Kentridge has even stated that these red marks are "bruising on the landscape", conjuring notions of conflict within a sublime landscape. Kentridge also puts his own stamp on the landscape by using motifs that he repeats throughout his oeuvre such as a megaphone and pylon that are all visible on the horizon.

Bibliography
Margaret K. Koerner, William Kentridge: Smoke, Ashes, Fable (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2017) p.44
Lilian Tone, Kate McCrickard and William Kentridge, William Kentridge: Fortuna , (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), p.92
Kate McCrickard, William Kentridge: WK, (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), pp. 22-23