William KentridgePour, 2022
Kentridge’s ‘Pour’ is both a reference to his ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot’ Venice Biennale and episodic streamed series, and very much in keeping with the initial aspiration of his bronze glyphs, in giving a shadow heft: “I never thought of myself as a sculptor, but I had worked a lot with shadows in performance and in drawings and I was interested in the possibility of making something like a shadow – so ephemeral and without any substance – to be solid.”
As one of the most immediately recognisable forms of all of Kentridge's medium-sized bronze glyphs, and a silhouette that has existed in his oeuvre for several decades before he started creating them, ‘Pour’ has been omnipresent in Kentridge museum shows ever since he created it, and is currently on display in his exhibitions at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, and Palazzo Collicola, Spaleto.
Whilst the other sculptures, drawings, etchings, and tapestries of the ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot’ series tend, as the title suggests, to be premised on himself, with all the typical Kentridgean self-deprecation that entails, this particular rendition is deliberately female, as he puts it:
“There is something feminine about the skirt of a coffee pot that I love. And in this bronze sculpture, I’ve deliberately given her a hip and a shoulder to emphasize the anthropomorphic component of it. In this case it’s got, if not a corset, a pinched waist and a large bottom.”
