Word: african
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Kentridge is a South African whose star has been quietly rising for more than a decade, years when his drawings and animated films made him a favorite of the art-festival circuit and he began designing opera productions in Europe and the U.S. But the sober-minded man we meet in "William Kentridge: Five Themes," a survey of his work that just opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and will travel to seven cities, seems especially pertinent these days. The question at the center of so much of his work--What do you do when the world...
Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, the "rather desperate provincial city," as he's called it, where he still lives and works. His parents were both lawyers active in defending victims of apartheid. Their son took degrees in politics and fine arts from South African schools. For a time he tried acting. In the early '80s he studied mime and theater in Paris. But by the middle of that decade, back in Johannesburg, he had committed himself...
...center of Kentridge's work are the hand-drawn animated films he started making in 1985. Some are intended to be viewed one at a time, like the mournful vignettes from the lives of his fictional alter egos: Soho Eckstein, a rapacious South African businessman, and Felix Teitlebaum, a melancholy soul who pines for Eckstein's sensuous wife. Others are produced as parts of multiscreen installations in which eight or more unfurl simultaneously on all four gallery walls. So in 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès, his semicomical riff on the artist in his studio, we see Kentridge climbing...
What are the sources of that grief? You might call it a nonspecific social and personal malaise. It was never Kentridge's way to tackle South African history head on. As a white South African, he once described himself as living at the "edge of huge social upheavals yet also removed from them." During the apartheid years, he didn't make propaganda films about the bitter fruits of the regime. Instead, he contrived melancholy parables about the psychological predicaments of life within a brutal and brutalizing system. You sense he's a man who would be happy to retreat into...
Giansanti, of course, had other subjects: World Cup soccer stars, Formula One racers, African tribesmen. He also took searing photographs of the aftermath of the 1985 terrorist attack at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport. His last major project was a series of portraits of people he described as Italy's unsung stars in such fields as law, education and geology. But he will be remembered for two things: the death of a premier and the life of a pope...