The linocuts began as a series of small ink drawings made on pages of old dictionaries – created in a state Kentridge described as ‘productive procrastination’, which marked the period of preparation for the Norton Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in early 2012. He is currently working on an extensive body of linocuts entitled Universal Archive.
His work is included in many important collections such as The Tate in London, UK, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), both in New York, USA, among others. A major itinerant retrospective of his work titled William Kentridge: Five Themes continued until 2012 after an international tour that began at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, in 2009. Compared to the twenty volumes of the original OED, this work is more approachable and more likely to be owned by individuals rather than institutions thanks to its reduced cost. Kentridge’s drawings remain the driving force behind collaborations in films, theatre and opera, and have been exhibited widely in international exhibitions and biennales. An abridged version of the 1928 Oxford English Dictionary, this work compresses the original 15,000+ pages into only two volumes containing 2,500 pages. William Kentridge is perhaps best known for his animated films based on charcoal drawings, while he also works across printing, etching, collage, sculpture and film. Linocut printed on non-archive dictionary pages from shorter oxford english dictionary.
Lives and works in Johannesburg 'Universal Archive (Ref 23)', 2012. Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa.