As part of the sale devoted to Modern and Contemporary African Art on Wednesday 24 June 2020, PIASA auction house in partnership with Aspire Auction, is excited to present a work by South African artist William Kentridge.
Great-grandson of a Jewish emigrant from Lithuania, William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1955. After studying political science, he trained at the School of Fine Arts in his hometown. He also became acquainted with theatre and mime in Paris in the late 1970s, which allowed him to direct from 1975 to 1991 at the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in Johannesburg.
The multidisciplinary nature of his artistic approach (film, drawing, sculpture, graphic design, music, theatre and opera) has made William Kentridge the most recognized South African artist in the world today. In 1989 he created his first animation work, "2d greatest city after Paris", in the series Drawings for projection. In this work he used a technique that has become characteristic of his work: successive charcoal or charcoal drawings, always on the same sheet of paper, unlike the traditional animation technique in which each movement is drawn on a separate sheet.
The iconoclastic power of this image of Soho as the ultimate symbol of the excessive cupidité́ is remarkable, testifying to the artist's extraordinary capacité́ to create an atmosphere with a few strokes of charcoal on paper.
William Kentridge (né en 1955, Afrique du Sud)
Drawing from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (Soho Eating),1989
Fusain et pastel sur papier
110 x 130 cm
Estimation : 190 000 / 250 000 euros
Drawing from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (Soho Eating), the work offered for sale on Wednesday 24 June 2020, is estimated at between 190,000 and 250,000 euros. It was presented in 2001 at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington. Some of Kentridge's oldest and most politically influential artistic precursors are of European origin. One can count William Hogarth, Bertolt Brecht and, above all, the French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, whose absurd representation of the bourgeois cupidité́ in the figure of Ubu Roi was a major stimulus for the artist for the character of Soho.
