Thirty mild steel music stands of varying heights serve as scenography for a browsable selection of studio notebooks by William Kentridge. Chris van Niekerk reinterprets a 1927 Gerrit Rietveld piece, Leggio, using a single material and continuous junctions with hidden welding employed throughout. The colour scheme is derived from William Kentridge’s use of charcoal and Faber Castell’s 126 permanent carmine red pencil.

Manufactured and installed by Kyle Morland with design support from Chris van Niekerk.

"Presenting a browsable selection from William Kentridge's studio notebooks, History on One Leg is interested in Kentridge's studio tools, routes, detritus and projections. Resting on things like music stands in A4's gallery, the notebooks offer themselves to be read or deciphered. As a vital part of the artist's studio process, their pages are a place for 'thinking forwards', where sketches, scores, diagrams, lists, and phrases appear. Unlike a diary, the studio notebook is rarely a site for retrospective action. Propositions are made, things may, or may not, be further developed. For the first time in the artist's practice, the notebook becomes a complete site for work – the place to compose a film, mapped exactly from the notebook's pages and shown in this exhibition."

Curated by William Kentridge and Josh Ginsburg

History on One Leg, 21 December 2024–17 April 2025. Images and text courtesy of A4 Arts Foundation.