Artworks Selection: West Coast Series

In 2010 Eben Sadie of Sadie Family Wines – a small, prestigious winery based in the southern Swartland, inland from Elands Bay on the Cape West Coast of South Africa – released a limited edition of six wines made using grapes harvested from vines that were planted in around 1900. The wine collection is called the Ouwingerdreeks (Old Vine Series) and the winery approached William Kentridge to create labels that would correspond with the fineness of the wines. The six images that Kentridge created for the labels are a combination of ink wash drawings and collage. In January 2010, Kentridge came into the David Krut Workshop to discuss the possibilities of translating the drawings into series of etchings with Master Printer Jillian Ross – a movement between media that is common within Kentridge’s practice. The five etchings that resulted build upon and modify the drawings on which they are based.

The imagery in these prints is inspired by the visual and historical landscape of the Swartland region, and other valleys far up the West Coast in the Olifants Rivier region, where the vines were located. The prints were created through the full utilisation of techniques available to a printmaker. Delicate drypoint lines swirl through washes and splashes of pale grey spitbite aquatint, combined with the deep and solid marks of sugarlift aquatint and hardground etched lines. Handpainting, burnishing and attached fragile chine collé resolve the prints.

Some of the imagery of the prints will be familiar to followers of Kentridge’s work; the anthropomorphic objects proceeding across the landscape are reminiscent of works such as Portage (2000) and those of L’Inesorabile Avanzata (2007). In this series, Kentridge has reimagining these object-figures within the landscape of the Swartland and the tools of wine-making: the secateurs used to harvest the fattened bunches of grapes; the windmill that pumps life-giving water to the maturing vines; the world marching through the landscape on electric pylon legs. In Untitlted (Skurfberg), the landscape is untouched and unoccupied, and the use of hand-painting by the artist ensures variation within the edition. Finally, a nude female figure – perhaps an embodiment of the landscape pre-colonisation – undresses within the encircling arms of an imposing black chair.

Read Wine writer Tim James’s article about his experience of the visit to the Swartlands with Kentridge, Sadie and Kruger.