William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in letters and line

William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland are two of South Africa’s foremost visual artists. Kentridge is a successful animator, opera director, performer, and draftsman, while Koorland has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim as a painter, printmaker, and maker of objects. They first met as university students in the mid-1970s, and ever since then their friendship has been mutually enriching, inspiring and informing their artworks in myriad ways. This book pays testament to that enduring friendship, bringing together a diverse selection of works from each artist to explore the formal and thematic links between their different practices.

The authors explores a variety of facets that unite the works of Kentridge and Koorland, including the role of writing; the relationship between drawing, painting, and animation; their interest in film; their understanding of lines, alphabets, and letters; and the correlations between the iconic and the abstract and maps and mapping. Briony Fer, Joseph Leo Koerner, Ed Krčma, and Griselda Pollock provide insightful, fresh perspectives on the artists’ lives and their work, followed by a conversation between the Kentridge, Koorland, and curator Tamar Garb. The book features 120 color illustrations drawn from a wide selection of artworks by each artist, including works on paper, maps, and sketchbooks that have rarely been seen by the public before.