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David Krut Print Workshop is pleased to announce the publication and release of a new portfolio of four prints by William Kentridge entitled William Kentridge Flute Portfolio.

Three of the four images in the portfolio make reference to the themes of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, or at least to those themes of the opera that emerge most strongly in Kentridge’s acclaimed production, which was commissioned by La Monnaie in Brussels and ended its world tour in South Africa in October 2007. In William Kentridge Flute Portfolio: Bird and Figure, Kentridge has alluded to the character of Papageno the bird catcher, the rambunctious, wine-loving foil to the hero Tamino in The Magic Flute. In the opera, the bird catcher appears as a projection on a screen behind the singer playing the part of Papageno, conjuring birds from the air. He is at once a reflection of Papageno and a representation of the artist himself. This same figure appears in various forms in a number of other prints and drawings made by Kentridge while he was at work on the opera.

William Kentridge Flute Portfolio: Constellation suggests a connection to the cosmic imagery in the opera, projected as swirling lines and lights during the arias of the Queen of the Night and in other scenes. The dense black background in the print, achieved through the use of aquatint, alludes to Kentridge’s many experiments with projections of white lines onto black backgrounds in the opera and in the projects he worked on during the same period.

The fourth print in the suite, William Kentridge Flute Portfolio: Newspaper, makes a subtle connection between The Magic Flute and Black Box/Chambre Noire. Black Box, commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, is a searing analysis of the massacre of the Herero people by the Germans in German South West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904. Completed while Kentridge was at work on The Magic Flute, Black Box re-examines the Enlightenment ideals celebrated in the opera in the light of European colonial expansion and the ills it brought with it. The bird motif in Kentridge’s production of the opera reappears in Black Box, but where it earlier conveyed the playfulness of the bird catcher Papageno, in Black Box it has sinister associations with the eagle of the German Reich. And the rhino, no stranger to Kentridge’s work, occupies centre-stage in this print, pointing to the magical, animal-taming powers of Tamino’s magic flute in the opera and to film footage of a rhino hunt used in both productions as a symbol of Europe’s plundering of the African continent.

Each print in the portfolio is printed in an edition of twenty. Smaller versions of the prints, in editions of twenty-five, were made to accompany the deluxe edition of the book William Kentridge Flute. The portfolio was editioned by printmaker Jillian Ross at David Krut Print workshop, Johannesburg.

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