William Kentridge /

William Kentridge's drawing-based works, encompassing animated films, theatre and opera productions, present a uniquely evocative, emblematic, view of the state of South Africa today: from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings to traces of apartheids violence in the landscape around Johannesburg. Kentridge's animated films are patiently built up from series of single drawings, incorporating erasure as well as the addition of lines and forms; a weeks drawing can give rise to just forty seconds of animation. Socio-political traumas such as apartheid are narrated through his haunting imagery. Like early twentieth-century Expressionists such as Max Beckmann, or early Soviet artists and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Kentridge depicts political realities as they are expressed in terms of the individual human suffering they produce. Working primarily in drawing, theatre, film and printmaking since the 1970s, Kentridge attracted international critical attention when his w ork was presented in 1997 at the Johannesburg and Havana Biennials and at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. His work is on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1999, and featured at the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, London, in 2000. A major touring exhibition of his work will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, during 2001. American curator and critic Dan Cameron surveys Kentridge's work within the context of politicizied art practice while analyzing the formal innovations of his animation techniques. European at critic and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev discusses with the artist the political and philosophical dimensions of his relationship to drawing. Booker Prize-winning South African novelist J.M.Coetzee focuses on the artists animated film History of the Main Complaint (1996), as a pivotal point in the development of Kentridge's best-known chara cters Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. The Artists Choice selection is an extract from Confessions of Zeno (1923) by Italo Svevo, which reflects the autobiographical content of the artists work. Kentridge's writings span meditations on the process of drawing, the political situation in South Africa and traditions of representation upon which he has drawn, ranging from Goya and Hogarth to Beckmann and Eisenstein. - Dust jacket.