William Kentridge
The Nose

William Kentridge was commissioned in 2006 by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to design and direct the opera The Nose by Dimitri Shostakovich. In December of the same year, he began a collaboration with printmaker Jillian Ross of David Krut Print Workshop, Johannesburg on a suite of etchings that would explore some of his many ideas for the opera. The prints were imagined as an adventure with the protagonist of The Nose, through modern Russian history, literature and art, with side trips into Cervantes, Sterne and Russian film. They demonstrate Kentridge’s superb mastery of drypoint and etching, his wry, iconoclastic treatment of Western art history, and his ongoing commitment to making limited-edition work on paper an integral part of his substantial oeuvre.