Executed in 1979, Exhibition: Couch Talk (Pit Series) is a rare and singular document of William Kentridge’s formative engagement with printmaking, drawing and theatre. The composition stages two distinct realms of spectatorship – below, two figures occupy a violet sofa beneath a pendant lamp; above, a compressed frieze of faces and outstretched hands peers over a dark barrier, suggestive of a balcony, gallery rail or stage edge. At left, vertical strokes of violet, blue and green read simultaneously as curtain, proscenium and passage.

The expansive black field is not merely a background but an active pictorial space, separating and connecting the domestic scene with the watching crowd. Hand-applied passages of ochre, turquoise, violet and pale blue animate the monotype’s dense surface, while the restless linear marks give the figures a provisional, performative quality. As a unique transfer monotype, the work occupies a compelling threshold between print and drawing – mechanically transferred yet irreducibly singular.

Previously absent from the artist’s archive, the work was rediscovered following Kentridge’s 2019 Cape Town exhibitions and subsequently documented as S.153 in Warren Siebrits’s catalogue raisonné. Its recovery restores an important early image to Kentridge’s graphic chronology, revealing the emergence of enduring concerns with staging, spectatorship and the unstable boundary between private encounter and public spectacle. This framing accords with Steidl’s account of the catalogue raisonné as recovering “lost and obscure tributaries” within Kentridge’s early print practice.

NOTES

I suspect this was one of the earlier ones rather than the later ones where it had crayon and coloured pencil additions.

–William Kentridge in Siebrits, W. (2022). William Kentridge: Prints and Posters 1974–1990, Volume 1.1. Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, p.203.

Until recently, there had been no record of this work in Kentridge's archive. In the months after the opening of the dual exhibitions, Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, and Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture at Norval Foundation, Cape Town, in August 2019, a visitor to the exhibition made contact with the Kentridge studio saying he had bought a number of unsigned works from the Chelsea Gallery, Wynberg, Cape Town, in the early eighties. Exhibition: Couch Talk was one of two monotypes that he had purchased, the other also being a transfer monotype, Will of a Rebel (Siebrits 82).

This is a unique impression. This work did not form part of Kentridge's first solo exhibition at the Market Theatre Gallery, Johannesburg, and is currently in a private collection in Cape Town, South Africa.

–Warren Siebrits in Siebrits, W. (2022). William Kentridge: Prints and Posters 1974–1990, Volume 1.2. Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, p.500.

See Steidl promotional video featuring this work: