Strauss & co - 2015 Mid-year Review

Sales in the millions of rands are, nowadays, commonplace for William Kentridge. His Shrouded Figure in a Landscape fetched more than R2.15 million at Strauss & Co’s June 1 Johannesburg auction. In November 2014 Extensive Landscape with Figures and Swimming Pool sold for over R3 million and Drawing for Stereoscope: Soho at Desk on Telephone went under the hammer for R4 million (on an estimate of between R1.2 and R1.6 million) achieving a South African record for the artist. Large drawings, Kentridge’s landscapes are generally set in the post-apocalyptic spaces of Johannesburg mine dumps, desiccated, desolate and forlorn. A strew of things and figures – posts driven into the ground, message-boards, broken down fences, read like signs into and across the landscape, while transplanted elements – a desk with a businessman gazing out, a swimming pool, columns of people passing through towards some destination or other, fragments of manufactured objects – like a surrealistic mise-en-scène to make up a wasteland for troubled dreams. The artist creates a world that is like a displaced set for the movie Last Year at Marienbad in its frozen sense of loss. Kentridge’s vision is remarkable, both in its transcendently literary expression of alienated consciousness and quality and the way it finds expression in an iconography which, while difficult to nail down, is nonetheless anchored in the secret imagery of the Witwatersrand. And this is as true of the way he builds his landscapes as it is of the businessman, Soho, engulfed in an exchange of wires and pylons leading into depth. William Kentridge Drawing for Stereoscope: Soho at Desk on Telephone Sold R4 092 480, 10 November 2014 SOUTH AFRICAN RECORD FOR THE ARTIST 8