William Kentridge Goat, 2021 Bronze Work: 120 x 80 x 150 cm
William Kentridge’s glyphs are a visual dictionary of sorts made up of a series of sculptures that form a vocabulary of symbols, representing a collection of everyday objects, suggested words, or icons that reoccur throughout the artist’s practice.
The glyphs started as ink drawings and paper cut-outs, each transformed into bronzes, to embody the weight and character their shapes on paper suggested. In their smaller form, they can be arranged in order to construct sculptural sentences and rearranged to deny meaning. In late 2017 and early 2018, Kentridge chose a selection of glyphs from the small-scale Lexicon set and made larger-scale versions, each close to a metre in height.
“I always thought of one of the small Cursive pieces as barbed wire – two trestles holding this loop of curls and swirls – the way it looked when gathered from the work I was doing on Wozzeck from the First World War, which included landscape drawings with barbed wire fairly similar to this. It struck me that the small Cursive piece was standing on four legs, which were in fact the edges of the trestles supporting the swirling suspended in the middle. That the central swirls were something of the belly, and the shape altogether, reminded me of the outline of Picasso’s goat – one of the great sculptures of the 20th Century. Without adjusting the body of the sculpture, I simply cut out a cardboard schematic goat’s head and suddenly this abstract set of swirls turned into the creature. So, the goat was a discovery – I hadn’t really known at the beginning that it would become one.” - William Kentridge, Johannesburg, November 2021
