Strauss & co - 1 November 2010, Johannesburg

139 207 William Joseph Kentridge south african 1955 – Drawing from ‘WEIGHING ... and WANTING’ signed conté with heightening 75 by 105,5 cm R500 000 – 700 000 Executed between 1997 and 1998. Towards the end of 1997 William Kentridge shifted from his experiments with chalk on black paper back to his more familiar technique of drawn and erased charcoal and pastel on white paper. The figure of Soho Eckstein re-emerges as an older man torn between the conflicting demands of the public world of business and the private world of love and intimacy. In 1998 these drawings crystallised into the poignant film WEIGHING ... and WANTING . The film was inspired by a dream in which the artist is consoled by a stranger who points out some writing on a wall. The title arises from the biblical story of King Belshazzar to whom a phrase appears on a wall informing him that he has been weighed and found wanting. Contesting images of dreams and reality, equilibrium and crisis, love and hatred and growth and destruction are explored in the body of drawings that Kentridge produced for the film. In these a range of metaphors are employed to examine a personal relationship under stress, which shatters and is reconstituted.