David Krut Projects is pleased to present William Kentridge Prints, 1992-2013: Published by David Krut featuring a selection of etchings and linocuts. This exhibition celebrates twenty-one years of collaboration and coincides with the return of Kentridge’s highly acclaimed theater production of Shostakovich’s The Nose at The Metropolitan Opera.

As a former teacher of printmaking, prints have always been central to Kentridge’s oeuvre, and essential as a component of his working process, rooted in mark-making and experiment. He uses the plate as a site for mark accumulation, relishing the malleability of the material - the scratching, scraping and burnishing, working and reworking - which enables the capture of ‘thought’, and parallels the process used in his frame-by-frame filmmaking.

At the center of this exhibition is The Nose, a suite of thirty prints created between 2007 and 2009, in preparation for the production’s premier at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010. Also included as tangential to his time-based productions are Zeno Writing (2002), a set of nine photogravures created while working on his short animated film of the same name, and The Magic Flute Portfolio (2007) a suite of four engravings that reference themes from the artist’s acclaimed production of the Mozart opera which debuted in 2005 at Le Théatre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels.

In his recent series titled, The Universal Archive, Kentridge returns to linocut, the first print medium he explored while a student. The Universal Archive was created at David Krut Print Workshop (DKW) in 2012, and consists of linocuts printed on Dictionary and Encyclopedia pages. Many of the images represent recurring motifs commonly seen in Kentridge’s art and stage productions: cats, birds, trees, coffee pots, and nude figures. This series forms part of the 2013 Hayward Touring exhibition, which is the first exhibition in the UK to focus solely on the artist’s prints.

David Krut was instrumental in assembling this touring exhibition and catalogue through the lending of prints and the provision of historical context.

To date David Krut has published over 200 of the artist’s editions. He met William Kentridge in the early 90s in Johannesburg and invited him to work with Master Printer, Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop in the UK. Here, for first time, Kentridge worked on large-scale plates, creating iconic works such as Blue Head (1993-98) and The General (1993-98). Krut and Kentridge continued to collaborate through the 90s with Krut publishing the first major publication on the artist in 1996 in the form of an interactive CD-ROM. He later went on to arrange the first exhibition of Kentridge’s prints in the USA in 1998 and by the late 90’s had curated exhibitions of the artist’s editions in Chicago, Washington DC, and New York.

In 2002, Krut established the David Krut Print Workshop (DKW) in Johannesburg and soon after, Jillian Ross assumed the role of Master Printer. Kentridge and Ross soon formed a close collaborative relationship and have worked together on numerous projects over the past ten years creating notable works such as Scribble Cat (2010), The West Coast Series (2010) and L’Inesorabile Avanzata (2007).