William Kentridge Carrier Pigeon, 2019 Bronze Work: 94 x 95 x 59 cm
William Kentridge’s “Lexicon” (2017) and “Paragraph II” are accumulations of elemental symbols within the artist’s larger practice, in the form of two series of bronze glyphs. This collective sculptural vocabulary is comprised of symbols, abstract forms, portraits, texts and the commonplace objects, ubiquitous in his oeuvre, that have become iconic of his work. Between 2017 and 2019, Kentridge chose a small group glyphs from each series and made larger scale versions, each of close to a metre in height.
Carrier pigeon is a reference to Kentridge’s acclaimed performance piece, The Head and the Load, which premiered in 2018 at Tate Modern. A play on the Ghanaian proverb, ‘the head and the load are the troubles of the neck’, this large-scale production expressively speaks to the nearly two million African porters and carriers used by the British, French, and Germans during the First World War in Africa.
