William Kentridge's Five Themes

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He is the artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. As Ando argues, early in Kentridge’s career, he was trying to find a suitable visual language, in the face of his position to the South African politics, Kentridge turned to Russia after the revolution of constructivism artists such as Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, who embraced the abstract express their utopia. Although the motives of these artists continued, but Kentridge did not adopt abstraction, perhaps because of their strong utopianism beyond his imagination. Instead, he turned to shaping and narrative expression of the concept of memory, loss and change his social and political landscape features. (Ando,
2010. William Kentridge: Five Themes. Utopian Studies. 21, no. 2: 332-336.) Kentridge studied African studies and political science when he attended university, he decided keep working on his major but using the different way. He started to create animating drawing to define narrate memory through the film. Mostly, Kentridge’s artworks are black and white charcoal drawing to present his major. Black and white are the color that lead viewer recall the memory what the artist want to express. Bird Catching Set I is Kentridge’s late work. I think this art work should be considered contemporary because Bird Catching Set I was created in 2006 when the time after 1980s. The time period from the 1890s to 1980s is the terms of Modern art, and the time period after Modern art should considered Contemporary