David Krut Publishing

The gallery at the front of David Krut Print Workshop (DKW) is presenting three artists who work in narrative series; Diane Victor, William Kentridge and Alastair Whitton. The works will be on display over the same period as the Deborah Bell exhibition, Collaborations II, at our projects space at 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood.

Diane Victor’s series entitled Birth of a Nation (2008-2010) consists of ten drypoints, which are also on show in New York and will be included in her retrospective at the Faulconer Gallery, Grinell College, Iowa. This is the same gallery which presented the William Kentridge Print Retrospective at the end of 2004.

In her first New York exhibition, South African artist, Diane Victor, presents a group of etchings and smoke drawings fraught with social commentary and, at times, an eerie and lurid reflection of the world around us. Throughout Victor’s imagery there is a tension and play between strength and fragility. Both her mark-making and the narratives presented highlight the ephemeral, delicate moments of life while also reminding us of their raw, hard-edged counterparts.

Alastair Whitton’s series is entitled Patmos and the War at Sea (2009), a complete set of which is currently on exhibition at iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art, in Cape Town. Arts writer Mary Corrigall has described the body of work as a series of “astute statements…about the relationship between language and imagery that challenge our expectations of photography.”

Whitton was one of four South Africans selected for the 2009 African Photography Biennial where his work was hosted by the Musee Nationale du Mali in Bamako. In his review of this international cultural event featuring photography and video from more than fifty artists from the African continent, Antawan Byrd highlights Whitton’s work as showing “real critical and conceptual engagement”.In 2007, William Kentridge completed a new suite of five prints titled L’ Inesorabile Avanzata at DKW. These works were commissioned by the Olivetti Foundation and were published over five consecutive weeks in the Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore. The prints in this series include images which use an appropriated newspaper format. Kentridge draws comparisons between the atrocities committed in the Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia 1935/1936, the inaction of the League of Nations at the time. The series closes with The World, a weary metamorphosis of the gasmask into Atlas; a classic Kentridge image of a burdened figure in profile, rickety legs striding across the landscape.

Earlier this year, Kentridge spent a few days visiting vineyards in the Swartland and far up the West Coast in the Olifants River region. During this time he originated various preparatory sketches, of the hundred year old vines, for his extremely popular West Coast series. He also provided drawings to be used on labels for six wines produced from the vineyards.

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