Zeno at 4 a.m.
William Kentridge South African
Printer Maurice Payne British
Publisher David Krut Fine Art, Inc.
Not on view
Kentridge developed this group of prints in tandem with a theater work of the same title, both inspired by Italian writer Italo Svevo’s masterpiece of solipsistic fiction Confessions of Zeno (1923). Svevo’s novel is written as the first-person journal entries of a narcissistic, middle-aged hypochondriac from Trieste named Zeno Cosini, who is telling his story at a psychotherapist’s request. For Zeno at 4a.m., Kentridge in part appropriates Zeno’s paranoid history as his own, and many of the objects represented in this suite of prints—the telephone, the transmission tower, the shower—are frequent protagonists throughout the artist’s projects.
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