Louisiana’s exhibition focuses on a number of the artist’s late works from the period 2003–2016, whose anatomy marks a new departure in Kentridge’s oeuvre. In the course of the past 15 years a lifelong enthusiasm for theatre, opera, literature, film and music has culminated in a number of virtuoso installations where these arts are linked by moving images, words, music and stage design. The scene has been set, so to speak.
As an introduction to Kentridge’s universe the exhibition shows the ten films Drawings for Projection (1989–2011); as well as the computer-controlled puppet theatre Right Into Her Arms (2016), which has its origin in Alban Berg’s unfinished opera Lulu; 7 Fragments for George Méliès, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon (2003), a nine-screen installation whose premiere was received with great enthusiasm by the reviewers at
the Venice Biennale in 2003; the work O Sentimental Machine (2015) referring to Leon Trotsky’s four-year exile on an island near Istanbul; the monumental procession of shadows More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), where the marginalized creatures of the world perform a dance of death before the viewer; the installation The Refusal of Time (2012), which was shown for the first time at Documenta in Kassel in 2012 and which forms part of the Louisiana Collection; and finally, a vital, poetic Kentridgian encyclopedia, the film Second-hand Reading (2013).
and drawings. “William Kentridge – Thick Time” is co-produced in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery, London, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
until 18 June 2017
William Kentridge – Thick Time
Curator: Mathias Ussing Seeberg
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Strandvej, Humlaebaek