William Kentridge Art

William Kentridge (b. 1955) is an internationally acclaimed South African artist renowned for his dynamic prints, drawings, large-scale installations, and animated films. Through his...

This is a monochromatic photogravure, aquatint and drypoint on Hahnemuhle Copperplate warm white paper. Created in 2010, it is signed in pencil lower right and numbered from the edit...

William Kentridge (b. 1955) is an internationally acclaimed South African artist renowned for his dynamic prints, drawings, large-scale installations, and animated films. Through his...

William Kentridge (b. 1955) is an internationally acclaimed South African artist renowned for his dynamic prints, drawings, large-scale installations, and animated films. Through his...

William Kentridge (b. 1955) is an internationally acclaimed South African artist renowned for his dynamic prints, drawings, large-scale installations, and animated films. Kentridge balances universal experiences with the complexity of South African political history and society. Born in Johannesburg to two prominent lawyers active in anti-apartheid efforts, Kentridge’s proximity to the dissolution of apartheid gave him a unique social sensitivity. His upbringing would shape the socio-political lens that informed his work as an artist. Kentridge is somewhat of a polymath. Having pursued formal education across politics, fine art, miming, and theater, it comes as no surprise that his work cannot be contained to the bounds of a single medium. Charcoal and ink are often his first tools for creation. The density, darkness and texture of the medium is instantly recognizable throughout his oeuvre.. Click here to learn more about Kentridge’s artist process from inside his Johannesburg studio. "Scribble Cat" is a paradigm of Kentridge's work and is instantly recognizable for its strong aesthetic and composition of layered pages. Kentridge's interest in cats stems back to his childhood when the prominent South African artist Cecil Skotnes...

William Kentridge (South African, b. 1955), "Waldsee 1944: Budapest / Soweto", Charcoal and Ink on Paper, 2003, signed in pencil vertically left edge, black frame. Image: 4.75" H x 6...

"Porter Series: Carte L'Europe (Shower Woman)" is a tapestry by South African artist William Kentridge. It is edition 1 of 5 (plus 2 APs) and signed verso "W. Kentridge". William Kentridge is a South African graphic artist, filmmaker, and theatre arts activist especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s. The pungent humanism he revealed in these and other works echoed a larger European tradition of artists such as Honoré Daumier, Francisco de Goya, and William Hogarth. Kentridge, whose father was a noted antiapartheid lawyer, attended the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (1973–76) and the now-defunct Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78). At various times in the 1970s and ’80s, he worked as an actor, playwright, set designer, and theatrical director, and he studied mime and theatre in Paris in the early 1980s. In 1992 he began an ongoing collaboration involving multimedia performances with Handspring Puppet Theatre (founded 1981) in Cape Town. As is clear from both his early training and his later artistic output, Kentridge’s interest in the visual arts was rooted in its connection with the theatrical arts. The narrative structure and character development in his films reflect this connection. While Kentridge pursued several avenues as an artist, at the centre of his work was a sequence of short animated films. To produce them, he made a rough charcoal drawing, photographed it, altered the drawing slightly, photographed it again, and so on. Kentridge’s original drawings are often completely effaced by their successors. Many of these films—including Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989) and Felix in Exile (1994)—follow the fortunes of the greedy capitalist Soho Eckstein and his alter ego, the sensitive and artistic Felix Teitelbaum. They present modern South Africa as reflective of the spiritual, ecological, and emotional crises of late capitalism. Kentridge later established himself as a consummate figure in the performing arts, particularly for his innovative stagings of the operas The Nose (2010) and Lulu (2015) at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Wozzeck (2017) at the Salzburg Festival...