How’s this for vanity art: William Kentridge sits astride a horse, like a Roman emperor, his profile beakily aloft as he controls his steed. Except this statue is not as solid as it sounds but a photographic mural of Kentridge in horse-riding pose behind a skeletal wooden horse constructed from parts of artist’s easels with a saddle slung over its cardboard tube of a body. Kentridge mocks himself, and mocks the pretensions of sculpture. Or does he? There’s a confident, showoff brilliance to this illusion and the parallel with a previous great artist is obvious.
Another sculpture, a more solid one, Goat, is a swirling tangle of lines solidified in space, capped with a goat’s head. It’s a homage to Picasso’s 1950 sculpture The She Goat. When you see Picasso’s art it’s not so much one specific work that awes you as the boundless flow of creativity that moves from one style to another in an inexhaustible, playful stream. Kentridge lays claim to that legacy here – and with justification. He is just about the only artist now who can dizzy you in a comparable way with the abundance of his creativity as his impulses dance from drawing to film to collage and back to drawing.
