Photo by John Hodgkiss, courtesy the William Kentridge Studio, © William Kentridge

William Kentridge, still from "A Lifetime of Enthusiasm," from the installation "I am not me, the horse is not mine" (2008). Eight-channel video projection, 6 min 1 sec.

March 2009 Field Guide

Ellen Gallagher

Jerzy Grotowski

Nina Könnemann

Yto Barrada and Hala Elkoussy

Do Look Back in Anger

Christian Jankowski

James Coleman

The Collection

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Possibly South Africa’s most renowned artist and one of its most formidable social critics, William Kentridge will debut his largest survey to date this month in San Francisco, which will then travel to eight other international venues. Consisting of more than 75 works — from his drawings made in the 1980s to his most recent Constructivist-derived works in preparation for the 2010 Metropolitan Opera debut of the Shostakovich opera The Nose — the exhibition is organized around five thematic motifs, such as absurdity, "residual hope," and "thick time." In the past few years, Kentridge has produced acclaimed reinterpretations of Ubu Roi and The Magic Flute to reflect on power inequalities, totalitarianism, and African colonialism, but he might still be best known for his fictional char-acters Soho Eckstein, a fat tycoon, and his Kafkaesque alter ego Felix Teitelbaum, whose strife mirrors that of South Africa’s final decade of apartheid. In conjunction with the exhibition’s launch, San Francisco’s Project Artaud Theater will present Kentridge’s rendition of Monteverdi’s opera The Return of Ulysses, with live actors, projected animation, and 13 life-size puppets.

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"William Kentridge: Five Themes" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.