25/09/2025 General News, Live Auctions
In the world of William Kentridge’s art, symbols rarely appear just once. The Dutch iris appears like a recurring thought in multiple works from the nineties – imagery we’re happy to meet again and again. Its violet petals fold and flare, sitting beautifully alongside the artist’s inky lines and charcoal greys.
But the story of this flower stretches far beyond Kentridge’s studio. Some hundred years prior, Vincent Van Gogh immortalised its velvety purples in his Irises of 1889, and artists from Bonnard to O’Keeffe continued to follow its graceful shape across canvases throughout art history. Over time, this flower has become a shorthand for resilience and fleeting beauty, but Kentridge makes the Iris entirely his own. In a talk on ‘Peripheral Thinking’ at the Design Indaba in 2016, Kentridge reflected on his flower works saying that for him they are about resisting the idea of having to work on big themes. He speaks of the absolute pleasure of drawing petal on paper.
Auction
17 September 2025 at 7pm
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