Two

Decades

of

William

Kentridge

The first floor of the eighteenth-century Palazzo Collicola presents a curatorial challenge. The rooms are heavy with the history of the noble Umbrian family whose countless paintings, portraits and precious belongings adorn this former residence, and nothing can be nailed or screwed to the walls and floors. Thus, William Kentridge’s series Blue Rubrics (2019) – framed works featuring maxims declared loudly in bright blue lapis lazuli watercolours, painted onto old logbook pages from the former Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope – is mounted on simple plywood stands, which face in multiple directions. The effect is captivating, lending a choral dimension to statements like To What End, God’s Opinion is Unknown or, my favourite, Let us try for once not to be right. To the left is the bronze sculpture Apron (2021), a surreal anthropomorphic apron-wearing megaphone painted black. Together, they set the stage for an exhibition spanning the prolific South African artist’s last two decades: drawings, animations, prints, sculptures, tapestries and notebooks. It is as much about Kentridge’s creative and conceptual process as about how we make sense of an increasingly polarised world.