“Every encounter with the world is a mixture of that which the world brings to us and what we project on to it. The tree is never just itself.”
— William Kentridge, “Peripheral Thinking” Lecture

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by William Kentridge. This solo show at the gallery and bookshop includes a projection of the animated film, Sibyl, 2020, large unique drawings, as well a selection of new etchings and linocuts.

William Kentridge, *You Who Never Arrived*, 2021. Courtesy: Kentridge Studio and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele

The trees within his practice were born of two memories and misassociations; a friend describing creating a Tshirt for a companion, heard by William “as a tree search”; and his father representing Nelson Mandela, Albert Luthuli and others in the South African Treason Trial of 1956-1961, which his son misconstrued as “trees and tiles.”

Decades later, whilst working with Indian ink to create images of more precise objects, Kentridge discovered the serendipitous beauty of using a splayed paintbrush to create branches and leaves, wherein the virtue of “the bad brush” is precisely that it “has lost its point, demanding the randomness of foliage.” – Kentridge, “Peripheral Thinking”. He goes further in “Footnotes for the Panther: Conversations between William Kentridge and Denis Hirson” – the new French edition of which we will be celebrating with a talk between both authors – that “it was an instance of the materials and process saying: “Here are the trees, waiting to be made from the bad brush.”

Kentridge invariably layers multiple pages of paper to create these works – the “tiles” of his trees – so that, in addition to the intricate foliage of ‘the bad brush’, a dense composite of distractions and associations assimilates and grows with it. The pages themselves are of course the product of actual growth, and Kentridge puts it, “trees led to books, and then on to paper and the words they hold (or release).”

This sense of myriad layers – paper, words and imagery – and specifically a proliferation of oak tree leaves with apparently incidental associations – is evident in Kentridge’s film Sibyl, projected in the lower level of the gallery. Fragments of ruminative phrases flicker on the pages of an unfolding dictionary, punctuated with dancing figures, trees, leaves and geometric forms. Conceived for, and developed from, his chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl, which was commissioned by the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma and premiered there in 2019, Kentridge collaborated with its composers Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd to create a score for the film as cacophonous as the pages he projected. The correlating etchings and linocuts of dancing figures, flowers, trees and leaves that Kentridge has selected and placed throughout this exhibition, all emerge from this trajectory of work and thinking:

“The Sibyl’s… turning pages allude to the myth of the Cumean Sibyl, who would write your fate on an oak leaf and place the leaf at the mouth of her cave, accumulating a pile of oak leaves. But, as you went to retrieve your particular oak leaf, a wind would turn and swirl the leaves, so that you never knew if you were getting your fate or someone else’s fate. One wishes to avoid one’s fate, but one knows that one is headed directly towards it. You know that it is coming, but you cannot predict it.

Hovering over the piece is the awareness that our contemporary Sibyl is the algorithm, which knows us and our destinies better than we do.

The lines that appear in the chamber opera come from a wide range of sources: from proverbs, from phrases found in notebooks, lines of poets from Finland, Israel, South Africa, North Africa, different places in South America and around the world – which are either used as they were or adapted or changed, but which in some way address the question: To what end?”
— William Kentridge, Johannesburg studio, 2020