reviews

  • William Kentridge, Nine Trees, 2012, linocut on pages from Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, overall 42 1⁄2 × 33".

    William Kentridge, Nine Trees, 2012, linocut on pages from Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, overall 42 1⁄2 × 33".

    William Kentridge

    University of Wyoming Art Museum

    “Universal Archive” is a haunted show in which absence makes itself felt as presence. Even the artist is a kind of ghost. William Kentridge, with pitch-black ink, obsessively painted repeated variations of specific objects on pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. He used a “good brush,” whose point held its shape and could create fine detail, as well as a “bad brush” that left behind the calligraphic wisps of a comet’s tail. Yet the images in this exhibition aren’t the originals but are exactingly made linocut prints that unerringly trace the artist’s

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