The Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan is pleased to announce the forthcoming exhibition of the South African artist William Kentridge, some of whose films forming part of a series devoted to Soho Eckstein has already been shown in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples.
A multi-disciplinary artist par excellence, his stories recount the history, the conflicts, the wounds and suffering of South Africa and the sense of guilt that is tearing the country apart in the transformational phase of post-apartheid and is accompanying it in the difficult path towards emancipation. Nevertheless, the strong ethical and poetic inspiration together with the energy and expressivity of his drawings lend his work a capacity for the emotional impact which enables the questions and metaphors he employs to reverberate beyond the immediate stories he tells. Themes such as exodus, fear and horror, desire, amnesia, power, oppression, physical, moral and social corruption, individual and collective responsibility, manage to attain a universal significance.
In this exhibition, the artist presents the installation Medicine Chest which he himself has defined as “screen specific”. It is a tripartite work of video-animation, consisting of three overlapping horizontal layers, attached to the glass door of a chemist’s cabinet. The images in the film refer to current events. The themes of the work are the stratification of the meaning of reality, the difficulty of constructing a stable identity and personal opinion, the fluctuating extremes between denouncement and compassion, the impossibility of considering a point of view as inflexible when it is based on the increasingly contradictory information we receive.
Exclusively for the evening of the inauguration on January 17 in Via Varese 17, a series of drawings will be presented related to the theatrical work Confessions of Zeno; this is the work that the artist is currently presenting to the international public and which served as the basis for a film due to be shown at Kassel in June 2002. The exhibition will also include engravings and bronze sculptures, tapestries and drawings done on the pages of old books.
