William Kentridge Dossier 2024

William Kentridge Premieres ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ in Venice 2024
An exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, Venice on view from 17 April through 24 November 2024

For his new exhibition at Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice, South African artist William Kentridge, renowned for his animated drawings for projection, as well as his sculpture, theater and opera productions over the last forty years, collaborates with curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, friend and author of the foundational monograph on his work published in 1998, to premiere his intriguing new nine-episode video series, ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot.’

This exhibition of thirty-minute episodes by Kentridge that were primarily created as a series for online viewing, is an experiment in embodiment and phenomenological experience in the digital age, and a reflection on what might happen in the brain and in the studio of an artist, today.

The nine-episode series was created and directed by William Kentridge, executive produced by Rachel Chanoff and Noah Bashevkin of The Office Performing Arts + Film, Joslyn Barnes of Louverture Films and the William Kentridge Studio. Walter Murch supervised the editing by South African digital artist Janus Fouché and Kentridge's regular collaborators Žana Marović and Joshua Trappler. 

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Shot in his Johannesburg studio during and in the aftermath of the 2020 – 2022 COVID-19 pandemic, and completed in 2023, these works will be viewed in a unique concentrated environment that partially recreates the studio where they were made. ‘Filming began in the first lockdown and the studio mimicked the closed spaces of COVID,’ states Kentridge, ‘but the studio is also an enlarged head, a chamber for thoughts and reflections where all the drawings, photos and detritus on the walls become these thoughts.’

As a physical exhibition space, the same size as his studio, this installation becomes a place between a private and a public space, the studio of a solitary artist deeply immersed in self-reflection and the joyous space of childhood play and of collaboration with others. These works, intended ultimately for online, mobile or television viewing, are a hymn to artistic freedom, ominously revealing the lack of freedom typical of our enclosed spaces in the digital era. They also foreground how the activity of mark-making with materials constructs the self in the process of making. Furthermore, the relationship between painting and musical scores, as well as between dance and drawing, become a form of mental gymnastics or yoga for the brain, exercises to expand and improve human intelligence in our era where the prosthetics of AI and the increasing use of social media ultimately and dangerously atrophy our cognitive and emotional abilities.

“William Kentridge”
Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Gallery 1A & 1B
May 4 - September 1, 2024

This survey of Kentridge’s work, spanning over forty years, opens in Taipei today. It is a collaboration between the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts in London and includes film, sculpture, drawings, tapestries and prints. From his earliest charcoal drawing to the stop-motion short film series of drawing for the projections, and from film directing to stage performances, as well as his recent large-scale drawings of trees and flowers using ink and charcoal, the exhibition meticulously traces his creative trajectory and aesthetic dimensions. Over four decades of dedicated exploration in monochromatic expression, Kentridge has developed a fresh vocabulary of expanded translation from his drawings. In his works, the seemingly limitations of black and white breed boundless energy. With subtle delineation, he conveys depth and complexity, revealing intricate layers of meaning and emotion. Visitors will not only be dazzled by Kentridge's remarkable mastery of materials shown in this exhibition but also witness how he employs poetic and humorous nuances to evoke profound resonance when addressing the solemnity in life.

Photos: ©️ Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2024

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Waiting To Forget Something
Lia Rumma Gallery, Naples
27 March – 25 June 2024

The Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples is delighted to announce the opening, on Wednesday 27 March 27 2024, of the solo exhibition of William Kentridge’s work entitled Waiting To Forget Something.

Kentridge is an artist of international renown thanks to his animated films, drawings, tapestries, sculptures, theatrical and operatic works. He will return to Naples at the Lia Rumma gallery (his first exhibition held there was in 1999), where he will present a poetic and varied corpus of works on paper and recent sculptures, confirming his capacity to bring together emotions and memory, and the relationship between desire, ethics and responsibility.

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William Kentridge: What Have They Done with All the Air?
Goodman Gallery Cape Town, South Africa
25 November – 20 January 2023

Goodman Gallery presents What Have They Done with All the Air?, an exhibition of new drawings and sculptures by William Kentridge. Works featured relate to a new theatre production in the making, titled The Great Yes, the Great No, in which the artist uses the journey of a ship from Marseille to Martinique as a prompt for unpacking power, colonialism and migration.

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The story behind The Great Yes, the Great No begins in June 1941, when a converted cargo ship, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, sailed from Marseille to Martinique. Among the passengers escaping Vichy France were the surrealist André Breton, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, the communist novelist Victor Serge, and the author Anna Seghers. The captain of the boat is Charon, the ferryman of the dead, who calls other characters onto the deck - Aimé Césaire, The Nardal sisters, who together with the Césaires and Senghor had founded the anti-colonial Négritude movement in Paris, in the 1920s and 1930s. Frantz Fanon joins the group along with Trotsky, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The boat journey is the 1941 crossing of the Atlantic, but also references earlier crossings from Africa to the Caribbean, as well as contemporary forced sea crossings.

The Great Yes, The Great No unfolds some of the techniques put into play in Oh To Believe in Another World (2022), a film that used green screens against which performers were filmed so that they could later be extracted from the background. In both Oh To Believe in Another World and The Great Yes, The Great No, Kentridge also draws on the green paper itself, and the colour assumes prominent place in the final work, rather than disappearing as a green screen usually would.

The exhibition features a series of new drawings that are used as backdrops in the performance. There are portraits of the characters in The Great Yes, The Great No, as well as imagined scenes from the boat’s arrival in Martinique - an idea of the exotic Caribbean, which is in fact the domestic garden of Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio. Densely packed vegetation is punctuated by fragments of text - phrases such as “the house of justice has collapsed” or “we want no prophets in this garden”. The phrases come from the theatre production and prompt the idea of a drawing being what you read as a text, or a text that, in this case, turns into a garden. In Kentridge’s words “How much do you glean from what you read, and how much of what you read is changed by what you’re seeing around it?”

Oh To Believe in Another World
Goodman Gallery London, UK
1 October – 12 November 2022

Oh To Believe in Another World is William Kentridge’s first solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery in London and marks thirty years of representation by the gallery.

The exhibition premieres the artist’s latest major work, an immersive five-channel projection made in response to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No.10. The installation lends the exhibition its evocative title - referencing utopia, our wish for it and the shadow it always casts.

The centrepiece of the exhibition has its origins in a commission by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, leading to a single-channel live orchestral performance in Lucerne, Pompeii and Johannesburg earlier this year.

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William Kentridge
24 September - 11 December 2022
Main Galleries, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts

Enter a new, immersive world by the multi-sensory artist and global creative powerhouse William Kentridge, in our major autumn exhibition.

Over the last decade, our single artist shows have captured the imagination of the public. Always large in scale, ambitious in scope and astonishing in execution, we’ve seen artists including Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley take on our Main Galleries. This autumn, it’s the turn of William Kentridge, South Africa’s most celebrated living artist.

Kentridge’s globally acclaimed practice spans across etching, drawing, collage, film and sculpture to tapestry, theatre, opera, dance and music. The Johannesburg-born artist developed his early work during the apartheid regime of the 1980s, and his electrifying large-scale productions and animations have since been shown across the world.

Transforming the Main Galleries, this is the biggest exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK. Many pieces have never been seen before, and some have been made specifically for the show. Spanning a 40-year career, you will find rooms of 4-metre wide tapestries, his signature charcoal trees and flowers, and the breath-taking three-screen film, Notes Towards a Model Opera. Watch as typewriters turn into trees, a hunted rhino somersaults with a megaphone, and a coffee plunger drills into the depths of a goldmine.

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William Kentridge ‘Singer Solo’
17 December 2022–5 February 2023
Tarmak22 Gstaad and Gstaad Palace

The gallery has collaborated with the Gstaad Palace to present two large-scale sculptures by Kentridge, titled ‘Her’ (2022) and ‘Cape Silver’ (2018), which are in dialogue with one another in the gardens, marking the first time that the artist has shown outdoor sculpture in Switzerland.

These works are larger versions of sculptures from Kentridge’s Glyph series, which  are on view as part of a presentation at Tarmak22, alongside a new sound installation work, collage and tapestry. Organized closely with Goodman Gallery, this is Kentridge’s second project with Hauser & Wirth, following his solo show in Hong Kong in early 2022. The presentation in Gstaad follows a major solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the biggest exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK to date.

The exhibition features a series of medium sized bronzes made in 2021 and cast at Workhorse Foundry in Johannesburg, which are scaled-up versions of figures from the artist’s Glyphs series. Kentridge takes two of these medium sculptures, ‘Her’ and ‘Cape Silver,’ and presents them as three-and-a-half-metre-tall bronze sculptures in the Gstaad Palace gardens.

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The outdoor works demonstrate a shift in scale that Kentridge has been exploring over the past few years, channelling a sense of movement across all three scales he works in. Despite the varying form of the two works—‘Her’ depicts a simplified figure striding forward, whereas ‘Cape Silver’ portrays Kentridge’s recurring motif of a coffee pot – both monumental sculptures hold an immediate anthropomorphic quality.