William Kentridge: Finally Memory Yields

On the ground floor, three new Indian-ink drawings of trees are exhibited for the first time: “Finally Memory Yields”, “Not Everywhere But Anywhere” and “An Argument Mired in Nostalgia” are among the largest trees ever created by Kentridge and will be displayed in his forthcoming Royal Academy solo exhibition.

The trees within his practice were born of two memories and misassociations; a friend describing creating a T- shirt 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’.”