William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines

William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland are two of South Africa's foremost visual artists. Kentridge is a successful animated filmmaker, opera director, performer and draughtsman, while Koorland has enjoyed widespread critical acclaim as a painter, printmaker and maker of objects. Born in the 1950s, they first met as university students in the mid-1970s, and have been talking about art ever since. Their friendship of nearly forty years has been mutually enriching, as the art of each has inspired and informed the other. This significant volume brings together a diverse selection of works from each artist to explore the formal and thematic links between their different practices. It focuses on the role of writing in their work, the relationship between drawing, painting and animation, their interest in film, their understanding of lines, alphabets and letters and the relationship between the iconic and the abstract, and maps and mapping.The book is divided into four essays by Briony Fer, Griselda Pollock, Joseph Leo Koerner and Ed Krcma, each of which provides a fresh perspective on the artists and their work, as well as a conversation between the artists and curator Tamar Garb, exploring the themes highlighted by the exhibition. The book features eighty colour illustrations of a wide selection of artworks by each artist including works on paper, maps and sketchbooks that have rarely been seen by the public before.Distributed for the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland.