William Kentridge
Fortuna
July 4–October 5, 2015
Museo Amparo
2 Sur 708
Centro Histórico
Puebla, Pue.
México
T +52(222) 2293850
Museo Amparo presents the exhibition William Kentridge: Fortuna, curated by Lilian Tone, writer and curator of contemporary art.
Fortuna provides a general overview of William Kentridge’s (b. 1955, Johannesburg) work since the late ’80s to the present day. The show highlights the way in which different techniques and disciplines nurture and communicate in his work—an artistic process marked by a continuous flow, based on the idea of transformation and movement.
Best known for his animated films based on charcoal drawings, Kentridge also works with engravings, books, collages, sculptures and performing arts. His practice, deeply associated with the landscape and social history of his homeland, connects in an eloquent manner politics and poetics, at the time in which he acutely refers to complex and difficult issues such as the legacy of Apartheid and colonialism. His work also includes a humoristic, even fantastical tone, allowing it to extend later towards universal themes such as the artistic representation, fugacity and the persistence of memory.
Kentridge adopts the notion of fortuna—chance—as a creative principle in his artistic practice. He describes it as “something other than cold statistical chance, yet something outside the range of rational control.” In other words, it can be understood as some kind of directed chance, or the engineering of fate, where there is both an open possibility at the same time as predetermination.
Fortuna makes allusion to a future in which the art work is under permanent construction, even if during the encounter with the spectator it appears to be a finished product. It also suggests a celebration of eccentricity that is not opposite to political commitment.
Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition emphasizes Kentridge’s unique creative process, as well as the correlation between the materials and techniques he uses. The selection of works and their connection with the exhibition space, seeks to offer the audience a glance to the vigorous and profuse activity of the artist in the studio, at the same time as a reflection to the migration of themes and motifs through the use of different techniques, materials and scales, examining the strategies chosen by Kentridge to depict objects and ideas.
The sample comprises four sections with a corpus of 284 works, including 38 drawings, 27 films, 184 prints and 35 sculptures, all created between 1989 and 2014.
William Kentridge: Fortuna has been shown in various museums in Brazil and Colombia. In Mexico, it was presented in Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) and finally concludes its tour in Museo Amparo. For this presentation, some unseen pieces were chosen to be presented for the first time, including the series Universal Archive (2012), Rhinoceros (2007), Bicycle wheel (2012), the series Rubrics, undo, unsay (2012) and The world on its rear feet (2014), which was created by Kentridge specially for this exhibition.
