William Kentridge: Trace. Prints from The Museum of Modern Art

William Kentridges art brings together drawing film animation sculpture and performance. He also applies his astonishing draftsmanship to the techniques of printmaking including etching screenprinting lithography and linoleum cut. In fact printmaking has always been essential to his work from his earliest forays into artmaking in the 1970s to his recent operas. Printmaking has been not just an edge to or a side journey from the work that Ive been making over the last 30 years or so the artist has said but is very much a key to it. Kentridges love of the printed image extends to books and he often draws and prints on unbound pages from encyclopedias ledgers and the like. In Trace both a catalogue of prints from the Museums collection and an artists book Kentridge uses translucent pages interspersed throughout the book to respond to his prints reproduced beneath them in a dialogue between past and present. The book also includes a lecture by Kentridge on printmaking illuminating its relevance to his broader practice.