William Kentridge at David Krut

A new exhibition by one of South Africa’s best-known artists, William Kentridge, opened this week at David Krut Projects in Cape Town.

What makes this exhibition especially exciting is the medium: all the works at the new exhibition are linocuts – a medium for which Kentridge is less well known.

But despite the scarcity of linocuts in his portfolio, one of the first prints he made in 1976 after finishing high school was a linocut. It portrayed an image of his grandfather in a deck chair, wearing a three-piece suit while on holiday in Muizenberg. Although the extent of the facilities available to Kentridge at the time was limited to “lino, cartridge paper and the back of a spoon”, he’s cited the image as a source for his famous ever-pin-stripe-suited character, Soho Eckstein.

Twenty-odd years later, the artist has briefly returned to the linocut and, co-incidentally, to Soho Eckstein.

The Ganeshian nature of Kentridge’s practice allows any selection of work to always contain traces of projects past or yet to come, as well as a particular sensitivity to the medium. The linocuts included in this exhibition were all created during the course of 2010 and reference Kentridge’s production of The Nose in March 2010, his recent exhibition in the Egyptian Collection wing of the Louvre, work towards The Refusal of Time, the Firewalker sculpture of 2009, and the return of Soho Eckstein in a new animated film.

This highly recommended exhibition runs from 9 May to 30 July 2011.

More information: www.davidkrutprojectscapetown.com, 021 685 0676