William Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1997, 2003, 2012), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998, 2010), the Albertina Museum in Vienna (2010), Jeu de Paume in Paris (2010), and the Musée du Louvre in Paris (2010), where he presented Carnets d’Egypte, a project conceived especially for the Egyptian Room. Kentridge’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was presented at Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, Festival d’Aix, and in 2011 at La Scala in Milan, and his production of Shostakovich’s The Nose was seen at The New York Metropolitan Opera in 2010 and again in 2013, travelling to Festival d’Aix and to Lyon in 2011. The five-channel video and sound installation The Refusal of Time was made for Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany, in 2012; since then it has been seen at MAXXI in Rome, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and other cities including Boston, Perth, Kyoto, Helsinki and Wellington. A substantial survey exhibition of Kentridge’s work opened in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, going on in following years to Porto Alegre, São Paulo, Bogota, Medellin, and Mexico City. In the summer of 2014 Kentridge’s production of Schubert’s Winterreise opened at the Vienna Festival, Festival d’Aix, and Holland Festival. In the fall it opened at the Lincoln Center in New York. Paper Music, a concert of projections with live music by Philip Miller, opened in Florence in September 2014, and was presented at Carnegie Hall in New York in late October 2014. Both the installation The Refusal of Time and its companion performance piece Refuse the Hour were presented in Cape Town in February 2015. More recently, Kentridge’s production of the Alban Berg opera Wozzeck premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2017, and last year his acclaimed performance project The Head & The Load opened at Tate Modern in London and travelled to Park Avenue Armory in December 2018. In June 2019, A Poem That I Used To Know opened at Kunstmuseum, Basel in Switzerland. This comprehensive survey show includes early drawings, major film installations, sculpture and two new pieces, an installation and a film, produced by Kentridge in response to works in the museum’s permanent collection. Why Should I Hesitate, a major survey show, divided across the Norval Foundation and Zetiz MOCAA, opened in late August 2019 and ran until July 2020. In addition, Kentridge’s new opera project, Waiting for the Sibyl, premiered at Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in September 2019. Waiting for the Sibyl was created in response to Alexander Calder’s Work in Progress. Most recently, Kentridge’s production of Alban Berg opera Wozzeck ran at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
In 2010, Kentridge received the prestigious 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 received the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa from the University of London. In 2012, Kentridge presented the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University and was elected member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Also, in that year, he was awarded the Dan David Prize by Tel Aviv University, and was named as Commandeur des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. In 2013, William Kentridge was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts by Yale University and in 2014 received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cape Town (Goodman Gallery 2020:1).
Marian Goodman Gallery (2018:1) in New York refers to Kentridge as “one of the most stirring and incisive artists of his time, combining artistic forms drawn from Surrealism and Dada, a deep meditation on the history of art in the early Soviet era to the stories, legacy, and ancient narratives of Africa and other parts of the world.”
William Kentridge was born in 1955 in apartheid-era South Africa. Kentridge’s family were Lithuanian Jews who fled to Johannesburg via Europe during the 19th century Russian pogrom. His family was incredibly involved in politics, from his grandfather’s role in parliament to his father, Sydney Kentridge’s, involvement in fighting Apartheid as a renounced lawyer[1]. On this political influence, Kentridge (Zeitz MOCAA 2019:14) wrote: “what made it necessary to be an artist was that need to establish meaning in the world in a manner that was not susceptible to the kind of cross-examination that a lawyer’s family would give it.” Interestingly he didn’t set out to have a career in the visual arts. From 1973 until 1976 he studied politics and African history at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Realizing his need for creative expression he decided to pursue his art interests. Kentridge studied Fine Art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation and the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris from 1976 and 1978 (artnet 2020:1). He loved drawing as a child, and after moving about in the theatre and film worlds, he went back to his original love of drawing.
Azu Nwagbogu (Zeitz MOCAA 2019:11) explained Kentridge’s representation of politics and social themes as being from a personal position that is constantly shifting as his personal story develops. He commented that “it is Kentridge’s interactive presence that informs the social and political content of his work.” This is clearly visible in the many artworks that includes his self-portraits, which trace his own personal evolution over time.
Through his artworks he is known to explore the instability of knowledge in the world via his objects that morph or disappear as a metaphor for the events and experiences of our daily lives. By staging illogical events with often illogical figures, Kentridge questions the solidity of text and of images. Kentridge’s goal with his artworks is to subvert our understanding of reality and to help us question our assumptions about the world.
His work was also inspired by artistic satirists, including Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879), Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828), and William Hogarth (British, 1697-1764). By the 1990s, Kentridge had established an international audience and reputation. His works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since the 1980s, Kentridge has been awarded various prizes, such as the Kaiserring Prize, the Carnegie Prize, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, and the Red Ribbon Award for Short Fiction (artnet 2020:1).
The artist has experimented across forms, from flip books and stop animation to live performance, operas, drawings, sculpture, and shadow plays. According to Marian Goodman Gallery (2018:1) “He creates an enveloping world of forms and characters that are haunting, mournful, and hopeful as they look towards their common humanity.” Koyo Kouoh (Zeitz MOCAA 2019:40), the Director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, beautifully summed up the experience of looking at Kentridge’s artworks stating that: “As a viewer, I feel like I’m in multiple levels of endlessness: the endlessness of history, of exploitation, of beauty, and poetry. With each recurrence, we see the same features of the human condition.”
[1] Sir Sydney Kentridge KCMG, QC (born 5 November 1922) is a South African-born former lawyer, judge, and member of the English Bar. He practised law in South Africa and the United Kingdom from the 1940s until his retirement in 2013, and played a leading role in a number of the most significant political trials in apartheid-era South Africa, including the Treason Trial of Nelson Mandela and the 1978 inquest into the death of Steve Biko. Kentridge’s wife, Felicia Kentridge, was also a leading anti-apartheid lawyer.
Sources:
- Zeitz MOCAA. 2019. Why Should I Hesitate. Putting Drawings to Work. Cape Town: Koenig books.
- William Kentridge – Open. 2018. [O]. Available: https://www.sculpturemilwaukee.com/william-kentridge/Accessed 15 August 2020.
- MoMA. William Kentridge – Taking in the Landscape from Little Morals. 1991. [O]. Available: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/91881/Accessed 16 August 2020.
- Kentridge. 2018. [O]. Available: https://www.art.co.za/williamkentridge/what-will-come.php/Accessed 15 August 2020.
- William Kentridge. The Magic Flute: Drawings and Projections. 2006. [O]. Available: https://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/314-william-kentridge/Accessed 15 August 2020.
- The Magic Flute. William Kentridge. 2011. [O]. Available: https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/william-kentridge-the-magic-flute-short/Accessed 17 August 2020.
- Midgette, Anne. Artist’s Video Adds Magic to ‘Flute.’ 2007. [O]. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/music/09flut.html/Acessed 14 August 2020.
- Simmons, Rosemary. William Kentridge printmaking at Jack Shirreff 1993. 2018. [O]. Available: https://davidkrutprojects.com/46365/william-kentridge-printmaking-at-jack-shirreff-1993/Accessed 15 August 2020.
- Goodman Gallery. William Kentridge. 2020. [O]. Available: https://www.goodman-gallery.com/artists/william-kentridge#bio/Accessed 14 August 2020.
- Inspirational Proverbs. Ghanaian Proverbs. 2020. [O]. Available: https://www.inspirationalstories.com/proverbs/t/ghanaian/page/2/Acessed 14 August 2020.
- William Kentridge. 2020. [O]. Available: http://www.artnet.com/artists/william-kentridge/biography/Accessed 15 August 2020.
