Present: Plastic Arts

William Kentridge is an internationally renowned artist whose work deals with poignant political issues of his native South Africa.

He has demonstrated the power of art to make a difference and has produced an extremely diverse body of work, including short animation films, drawings, prints and large-scale installations.

Born in Johannesburg to two anti-apartheid lawyers, William Kentridge studied politics and African studies at the University of Witwatersrand in the 1970s, going on to study pantomime and theater at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, working in various areas of theater, film and television. He co-founded the Junction Avenue Theater Company and closely collaborated with the Handspring Puppet Company, both in Johannesburg.

Kentridge’s work draws on a large range of sources, including philosophy, literature, opera, theater and early cinema, to create a complex universe where good and evil are complementary and inseparable forces. Though he moves back and forth between media, working in film, theater and opera, his primary output remains drawing – and he sometimes conceives his theater and film-based works as an expanded form of drawing.

In a now-signature technique, he photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script, he uses stereoscopic viewers and creates optical illusions with anamorphic projection, endowing his drawing with a third dimension.

William Kentridge spent much of his career intensively exploring themes that resonate with his own life experience as well as political issues that most concern him. “I am interested in a political art,” the artist has stated, “that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings.”

His vast body of work, comprising animated films, drawings, prints, theater models and productions, large-scale film installations, sculptures, and books – transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. His work has evolved as his subject matter has departed from a specifically South African context to confront more general concerns of social injustice, revolutionary politics and the power of creative expression.

William Kentridge is a contemporary “Renaissance Man,” whose masterly creativity in an overwhelming array of media forms a coherent body of work with a deeply humanistic focus. He is at once a supreme “individual” and a committed and engaged artist who constantly questions the impact of artistic practice on today’s world.

William Kentridge’s work has been displayed at the Metropolitan Opera and MoMA in New York, Jeu de Paume and the Louvre in Paris, La Scala in Milan, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Albertina Museum in Vienna. In 2010, Kentridge received the Kyoto Prize in recognition of his contributions in the field of arts and philosophy. In 2011, he was elected as an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa by the University of London.