SALZBURG.- The Museum der Moderne Salzburg is presenting a comprehensive survey at the museum’s two venues of the work of the internationally celebrated South African artist William Kentridge. Spectacular multimedia installations are on view on the Mönchsberg, while works for theater and opera are being shown for the first time in a dedicated exhibition in the Rupertinum—across the street from the Haus für Mozart, where Kentridge is directing Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck for the Salzburg Festival. A new installation in the Rupertinum atrium will also remain in place for a full year.
William Kentridge (1955 Johannesburg, ZA) rose to prominence in the 1990s with expressive drawings, which he animated in videos. His oeuvre, which covers four decades, has featured different artistic disciplines. For many years, Kentridge has been working successfully on major opera and theater productions. His close relationship with the theater, where he has worked as an actor, producer, set and costume designer, informs his visual art, and vice versa. His multimedia installations for exhibittions and the theater combine outstanding draftsmanship with theatrical vitality. A theme that runs through his entire oeuvre is his preoccupation with colonialism, revolution, and exile, and with the meaning of time and its manifestations. His art blends the epic with the mundane, comedy and tragedy. “William Kentridge offers us a comprehensive and distinctive range of artistic means, with which he magically links different disciplines and genres. It all starts in his studio in in Johannesburg, where he and his team develop projects through experimentation and improvisation. But the studio is more than just a place for brainstorming and production. Kentridge also uses it as a repository of earlier ideas, which he continuously resurrects and reinterprets,” explains Sabine Breitwieser, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and curator of the exhibition.
In the auditorium in the Mönchsberg building a classic work by William Kentridge, the film 10 Drawings for Projection (1989–2011) made from charcoal drawings, serves as an introduction to the artist’s favorite themes. The large exhibition space on level [4] showcases seven expansive multimedia installations. The works 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon (2003), a homage to the French silent movie pioneer, give an idea of the artist’s method of working. Two of his more recent installations will also be on show, Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015) about the Cultural Revolution in China and O Sentimental Machine (2015), produced for the Istanbul Biennale, about the Turkish exile of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In Second-Hand Reading (2013) Kentridge presents an early type of film in the form of a flip-book. The exhibition continues with The Refusal of Time, a spectacular work created for documenta 13 (2012) in Kassel about time as a form of political and social control. The large exhibition room features a procession of moving images on a fifty-meter frieze entitled More Sweetly Play the Dance (2016).
A selection of tapestries and objects and a reading room with numerous publications by and about William Kentridge round off the exhibition.
The stairs leading to the exhibition level provide the setting for a new anamorphic installation created specially for this site, which when viewed from a certain angle becomes a portrait of the Austrian composer Alban Berg.
The exhibition in the Rupertinum is dedicated to Kentridge’s exploration of theater and opera, with a separate project being looked at in each room. An installation consisting of black paper figures, made on site by the artist, leads visitors through the atrium to the two exhibition levels. A vast array of exhibits will be on show, including posters, drawings, sketches, models, and costumes, created since the late 1970s for his major productions.
The first room is devoted to early productions in collaboration with the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in Johannesburg, notably Sophiatown (1986–1989), a play about the Apartheid system. Other highlights include his productions Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria by Claudio Monteverdi (1998 for the Wiener Festwochen and Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels) und Preparing the Flute (2004–2005 for La Monnaie in Brussels), as well as the original stage set for The Nose by Dmitri Shostakovich (2010 for the Metropolitan Opera in New York). The sketches for Alban Berg’s Lulu, produced in 2015 for De Nationale Opera in Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, provide a link to the current production of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck for the Salzburg Festival. The kinetic miniature theater Right Into Her Arms (2016) is being presented at this exhibition for the first time. The new Wozzeck production also has a separate room devoted to it, and an artist’s studio has been installed in the Franz West Lounge in the Rupertinum, which is open to the public at certain times, enabling visitors to see the finishing touches Kentridge has done to his production, which has its premiere on August 8, 2017.
William Kentridge took part in the documenta in Kassel in 1997, 2002, and 2012, and in the Biennale di Venezia in 1993, 1999, 2005, and 2015. His work has won several awards and has been shown worldwide in solo exhibitions, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998, 2010), the Louvre, Paris (2010), the Albertina, Vienna (2010/2011), and the Tate Modern, London (2012), among others. The artist lives and works in Johannesburg.
After the presentation at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2017), and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2017), the exhibition Thick Time will be shown at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
