Strauss & co - 12 October 2015, Cape Town

The lino from which this edition was printed was destroyed in a fire. Another example from the edition on paper forms part of the Museum of Modern Art Collection, New York. Telephone Lady is a larger-than-life linocut print, depicting a woman striding across a recognisably South African landscape. Human and telephone metamorphose with the woman’s head becoming a large Bakelite telephone. The telephone motif and the concept of one object turning into another are as central to Kentridge’s visual vocabulary as is the iconography of migrancy. The scale of the work commands immediate attention while the bold strokes of the print invite closer inspection. Kentridge varies his mark making between the long grass or veld and the more stippled effect used as the landscape recedes into the distance. With a superb understanding of the medium’s possibilities, he creates bold silhouettes and contrasts the black ink with the clean white canvas. As part of a smaller edition of nine on canvas, its rich, velvety surface is unhampered by glass framing. This print needed to be editioned on South Africa’s largest press unlike conventional linocuts that are normally associated with manageable sized, readily available tiles. South Africa has a long linocut tradition effectively used by artists such as JH Pierneef and extending to black artists like John Muafangejo and Peter Clarke. It is this rich heritage that Clive van den Berg tapped into when, as the organiser of the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in 2000, he commissioned local artists to create large-scale linocut prints. Some of the prints produced were selected for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is this initiative that spawned the production of Kentridge’s powerful work embodying so many of the artist’s key themes. 577 275