William Kentridge - Nose series nr 5 "The reputation of a newspaper" - Verkocht

48/50The "Nose" Series explores a number of intaglio techniques, relying primarily on Kentridge’s strong drypoint marks, softened by sugarlift aquatint and punctuated, in several plates, with red. The series arose out of Kentridge’s preparation for his 2010 production of the Shostakovich opera with the same name for the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Shostakovich’s opera is based on Nikolai Gogol’s iconic story "The Nose" (1837), following 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. But he has also cast his eye back to consider some of the literary influences on Gogol, such as Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and even Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Drawing on these and other texts, including excerpts from Russian newspapers, clips from Russian films of the 1920s and 1930s, pages from Russian encyclopedias, and parts of a transcript of a 1937 meeting of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party in which the theoretician Nikolai Bukharin is being interrogated, Kentridge created not only his opera production but several other works, including this suite of etchings. In this series Kentridge follows the nose through leisure activities and art history as it defies its owner. The prints reflect on music, ballet, the history of Western art and the various fortunes of the Communist parties in South Africa and the Soviet Union. Subsequent prints were completed which for various reasons Kentridge did not consider to be a good fit for inclusion as part of the suite of 30 etchings, and were thus published as standalone images.
The series were printed at David Krut Workshop. Embossed with the David Krut Workshop chopmark in the margin.
Backside contains 3 small strips of sellotape from framing.

Image size: 20x14,5