Drawing for the film "Medicine Chest" by William Kentridge

Provenance:
Private Collection, Florida

Exhibited:
"William Kentridge", Hirshhorn Museum, 28 February-13 May 2001; travelling to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 3 June-16 September 2001; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 20 October 2001-20 January 2002; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 2 March-2 May 2002; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 21 July-6 October 2002; South African National Gallery, Johannesburg, 7 December 2002-23 March 2003

Literature:
Lilian Tone, "William Kentridge: Fortuna", London, 2013, page 102
William Kentridge, "William Kentridge", London, 1999, page 126

Born in Johannesburg during the apartheid era, William Kentridge’s multifaceted practice explores the personal and political to offer an ever-evolving flow of narratives through creation, disassembly, or erasure. His prolific output spans two decades across various media: film-making, sculpture, printmaking, artist’s books, performances, tapestries, opera, and theatre productions.

This charcoal drawing is for the film "Medicine Chest", a projection installation where the artist used a medicine chest and replaced its mirrored back with a screen to show an animation of various drawings. The subject’s format strongly resembles newspaper billboards in Johannesburg that present daily headlines. This found screen, or "écran trouvé", showcased drawings depicting personal and household objects stacked in three rows, as in a cabinet. They also featured self-portraits, written instructions, newspaper fly- bills, and landscape drawings, as is shown in the present work. Kentridge explains: “The interest is in finding the visual evocation of the incoherent and contradictory ways we construct a sense of ourselves. The drawings of the still lifes themselves refer back to the still lifes of Chardin, Morandi and Philip Guston.”

Here is depicted a barren, post-industrial landscape reminiscent of the southeastern outskirts of Johannesburg that Kentridge became familiar with in the 1980s while driving around the countryside in search of dramatic landmarks to sketch. With a soft chamois leather dipped into charcoal dust, he would swipe across a white sheet of paper to record these eerie landscapes. The present composition is divided into three rows, with a large billboard dominating the first register, evoking the industrial structures of his native country. As is typical of Kentridge’s films, billboards are omnipresent, featuring prominently in "Other Faces and Johannesburg–Second Greatest City after Paris". Pylons and amorphous forms dot the middle row, while the unpopulated section at the bottom appears to stretch towards the horizon with an assortment of derelict objects amassed in the foreground. Kentridge’s vast, desolate roadside views are haunting, revealing an unflinching vision of South Africa devoid of romantic overtones.

His investigation of the nature of landscape ultimately emphasizes the relationship between our perception of the world and our fallible recollection of the past, which Kentridge describes as “the difficulty we have in holding onto passions, impressions, ways of seeing things, the way that things which seem to be indelibly imprinted on our memories still fade and become elusive, is mirrored in the way in which the terrain itself cannot hold onto the events played out upon it.”

In 2025 Kentridge will join the roster of Hauser & Wirth while continuing to exhibit at Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples after being represented for over two decades by Marian Goodman Gallery. His works have been featured in major exhibitions, including the MFA Houston, Texas; the Broad Museum, Los Angeles; the Royal Academy, London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland. He has also presented at Documenta and the Venice Biennale on multiple occasions over the years.