Strauss & co - Review 2009

35 Reservoir with a Ladder signed and dated 87 charcoal and pastel, 146 by 116 cm SOLD R534 720, MARCH 2009 WilliamKentridge S OUTH A FRICAN 1955- William Kentridge’s Reservoir with a Ladder is one of a number of topographical drawings made in the late 1980s before he produced Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, his first animated film using charcoal and pastel drawings. This unidealised rendering of the terrain around his home city challenges conceptions of the landscape tradition so beloved in South Africa. Overlain with signs of human industry and desire, Kentridge’s drawing evokes “the landscape of the mind more than an actual geographic location”, says Staci Boris. “The public and the private coexist in this panorama – they are inseparable in reality as well as in the subconscious.” Staci Boris, ‘The Process of Change: Landscape, Memory, Animation and Felix in Exile ’ in William Kentridge , Abrams, New York, 2001, p 34.