William Kentridge
In the past four years, William Kentridge has received considerable exposure and acclaim in the United States. Sue Williamson summed up Kentridge's trajectory when she observed that twelve years ago, Kentridge walked around New York City trying to persuade art galleris to look at his slides without success. Things have changed considerably. In 1998, Kentridge held solo exhibitions including Drawings for Projection at the Drawing Centre, New York and Weighing and Wanting at MCA San Diego, and was a finalist in the Hugo Boss prize Exhibition at the SoHo branch of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Add to that the 1999/2000 Carnegie International Medal and a coveted slot in the MoMa New York Projects series and one could argue that the American Art scene should know who William Kentridge is.
About Atlas Procession
William Kentridge has continued his collaboration with master-printer Jack Shirreff by visiting 107 Workshop in Wiltshire, England in April 2000, to work on new large format etchings exploring the new imagery of his current work. The new editions reflect a procession of figures that the artist recently created for casting in bronze. They move in a circular procession within the large etched circle - an inward direction in the first and outwards in the second.
The film Procession was shown at the Prince Klaus Fund Awards in December 1999 in the Palace of the Queen of the Netherlands, Amsterdam on a screen which was the ceiling of the room, one hundred feet high.
The artist worked on the large copper plates for each of the images, using the traditional intaglio processes of etching, aquatint and drypoint. A letterpress plate then added maps from an atlas into the large circles. These are sections of maps found by the artist in an old atlas - the Islands between Greece and Turkey in the first, and the Islands of the China Sea in the second print. The map areas were scanned and enlarged using computer technology to allow the production of heavy duty nylon polymer plates which were produced in Johannesburg and shipped to the Workshop.
The artist has added extensive brush strokes of different grey watercolours to the areas around the circle and into the margins and the prints are fully worked to the edges of the paper.