| William Kentridge Nose: Thirty Etchings |
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| Wednesday, 17 February 2010 14:01 |
 William Kentridge’s ‘Nose’ suite of thirty prints will be exhibited at David Krut Projects in Johannesburg from 17 February - 10 April 2010. The prints explore a number of techniques but rely primarily on Kentridge’s strong drypoint marks, softened by sugarlift aquatint and punctuated, in several plates, with red. Each plate is engraved with a number signalling its place in the series. There are fifty prints in each edition and they have been editioned by Jillian Ross, Niall Bingham and Mlungisi Kongisa. This series will also be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from February to April 2010 and David Krut Projects, New York in February/ March 2010.
The ‘Nose’ series arose out of Kentridge’s preparation for his production of the Shostakovich opera The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera in March 2010. Shostakovich’s opera is based on one of the most famous stories in Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, published in 1837. The story follows the adventures of the pompous government official Kovalyov who wakes up one day to find that his nose has left his face and gone walking around St Petersburg. In his interpretation of Gogol and Shostakovich, Kentridge has projected the story forward to the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Russian avant‐garde, and then into the twentieth century to include allusions to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. |
