AMSTERDAM.- The South-African artist William Kentridge has donated ten major artworks to EYE Film Museum, which last year devoted a comprehensive retrospective exhibition to Kentridge’s work. The donation concerns all ten films for Drawings for Projections, the series that brought Kentridge fame in the 1990s. Among the films are Felix in Exile (1994), Stereoscope (1999), Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989), Tide Table (2003) and Other Faces (2011).

William Kentridge’s generous donation to EYE follows on the exhibition William Kentridge – If We Ever Get to Heaven, which ran in EYE from 25 April to 30 August 2015. With over 72,000 visitors, this has been EYE’s most successful exhibition to date.

Today a large project by William Kentridge opens in Rome. Entitled Triumphs and Laments: A Project for Rome, the new artwork involves a 500-metre long frieze on the embankment walls of the Tiber. The opening event on 21 April consists of a theatrical programme created in collaboration with composer Philip Miller and featuring live shadow play accompanied by two processional marching bands.

Kentridge became known as an artist with his exceptional animated films, charcoal drawings and installations. In addition he works as an opera and theatre director. An important and recurring theme in Kentridge’s work is the troubled past of his native country South Africa. Mainly by erasing and reworking charcoal drawings to create animated films and using simple pre-cinema techniques, Kentridge manages to visualize this conflict in all its complexity, exposing a world torn by social conflict.

“Working with EYE was a great pleasure on three levels”, William Kentridge said. “First of all, there’s the quality of the presentation. The projections and the sound have set a standard which other installations of this artwork have yet to equal. Secondly there was the film programme that was organized in support of the exhibition, which introduced me to numerous juxtapositions of film and music that were new to me. Thirdly, it’s the collection which is housed in the museum. Only rarely does the installation of a work at the same time offer the raw material which then becomes the start of a subsequent work – as has been the case with the superb material from the collection of the film museum.”

“EYE is very glad with this enormously generous donation”, Jaap Guldemond, Director of Exhibitions and Curator of EYE affirmed. “Kentridge’s work perfectly suits EYE’s collection and exhibition policy, which aims to explore the interface between film and other arts. Kentridge’s work is emblematic in this respect. As an artist he incorporates film, music, dance and other arts in his work, and bridges the boundaries between the various disciplines in his theatrical and operatic productions.”

Kentridge recently created a new artwork using material from EYE’s collection. This installation, which he called Sentimental Machine, includes footage of Leon Trotsky in Turkey and was made especially for the previous Istanbul Biennale.