William Kentridge

Born in Johannesburg in 1955, William Kentridge is internationally renowned for the expressionism of his work in numerous mediums, among them charcoal, printmaking, sculpture and film, as well as for his theatrical and operatic productions. As elusive as it is allusive, Kentridge's art is grounded in the politics of the post-apartheid era, science, literature and history, while always maintaining space for contradiction and uncertainty. This entry in Skira's Milestones series takes us inside Kentridge's protean studio practice through editorial photography, images and plates of key works explained by the artist himself as well as a "family album" with previously unpublished personal and archival photos. The volume also features an interview with the artist by Julian Barnes, winner of the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending.

Published with LUMA Arles.

The publication Je n'attends plus presents an ensemble of South African artist William Kentridge's (born 1955) major works, in conjunction with documentation of his new chamber opera, The Great Yes, The Great No, which had its world premiere at LUMA Arles in July 2024.

In his newest film series, Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, South African artist William Kentridge (born 1955) invites us into the whimsical, protean world of his studio (and, by extension, his mind). Kentridge experiments with every aspect of his practice: from painting and printmaking to his collaborative performance Waiting for the Sybil. This experiment in embodiment and phenomenological experience originally created for streaming (and now available on MUBI) has now been reimagined as a printed publication. Kentridge reworks each episode through a selection of film stills and script extracts, this new form reinvigorating the series' investigations into the relationship between mark-making and self-fashioning.

Following the publication of his Domestic Scenes (2021) and Catalogue Raisonné Volume 1: Prints and Posters 1974–1990 (2022), South African artist William Kentridge (born 1955) offers a more intimate look at a series of prints, singular and influential in his oeuvre, titled Carlton Centre Games Arcade (1977).
The Carlton Centre in Johannesburg, owned by the mining company Anglo American, was the most expensive and prestigious hotel and shopping complex on the African continent at the time and was just a short walk from Kentridge’s father’s legal practice. This complex was where he decided to begin the process of observational drawing that would lead to his first prolonged engagement with intaglio printing. This book is an opportunity for Kentridge enthusiasts to catch a glimpse of this little-known early series of 14 etchings and also offers a further taste of the ongoing catalogue raisonné project.

William Kentridge (born 1955) has been creating poignant, clever and visually arresting works across a variety of mediums for more than five decades. This book focuses on his long-standing relationships with printmaking and poster design. Over the past three years, South African scholar Warren Siebrits began compiling a five-volume catalogue raisonné of Kentridge’s prints and posters. In this first volume, focusing on graphics produced between 1974 and 1990, Siebrits presents the artist’s earliest forays into linocut, etching and monotype printing, to name but a few. While for many artists printmaking is informed by their work in what have historically been considered more valuable mediums such as painting and drawing, Siebrits emphasizes that Kentridge’s process has been quite the opposite. This intensive look at Kentridge first and foremost as a printmaker is thus crucial for a comprehensive understanding of his diverse and influential oeuvre. The chronology of the prints and posters helps reestablish many lost and obscure tributaries that will prove invaluable for following Kentridge’s trajectory.

The South African artist William Kentridge is internationally renowned for the expressionism of his work in numerous mediums, among them charcoal, printmaking, sculpture and film, as well as his acclaimed theatrical and operatic productions. As elusive as it is allusive, Kentridge’s art is shaped by apartheid and grounded in the politics of the post-apartheid era, and in science, literature and history, while always maintaining space for contradiction and uncertainty.
This volume presents early drawings and etchings from Ubu Tells the Truth; stills from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris and other films; six tapestry works; various drawing series, including Kentridge’s drawings of trees on various supports; a model theater; and more. These are punctuated by six meditations on the exhibition’s themes by Stephen Clingman: Drawn through Time; The Enigmas of Soho; Shadows of the Past, Shadows of the Present; Dualities, or How I Did Not Become; Timespaces, or Two Dancers; and Coda: Vanishings. Along the way, thought-collages, allusions and assemblages come together to create a connective, dimensional way of thinking inspired by Kentridge’s own habits of creation.

Published with The Broad.

This far-reaching book presents Kentridge’s dynamic art practice, which originates in charcoal drawing and expands into intersections with film, sculpture, opera and theater performances, printmaking and many other mediums. The volume is organized chronologically and thematically, emphasizing Kentridge’s destabilizing of South African and global narratives through openness to uncertainty, the generative power of the artist’s studio and perpetual change, all as conditions for illuminating repressed and silenced voices in historical records.
An essay by curator Ed Schad is presented along with studio photography, archival material and illuminating illustrations of Kentridge’s work, joining essays by globally recognized literary figures and thinkers Zakes Mda and Ann McCoy. Notably, the volume features a conversation between Kentridge and the famous film and sound editor Walter Murch, as well as a never-before-published lecture by the artist.
The work of William Kentridge (born 1955) has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Musée du Louvre in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, the Kunstmuseum in Basel and Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Opera productions include Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Shostakovich’s The Nose and Alban Berg’s operas Lulu and Wozzeck. In 2016 Kentridge founded the Centre for Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, a space for responsive thinking and making through experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary art practices. The center hosts an ongoing program of workshops, public performances and mentorship activities.

This book documents, for the first time, the entire 54 images—as well as an additional 65 plate progressions not previously known to exist—in William Kentridge’s important early series of etchings and aquatints, Domestic Scenes (1980). One of today’s most respected contemporary artists, Kentridge (born 1955) was only 25 years old and relatively unknown when he made these images, which are pivotal in how they shaped his thinking, studio practice and conceptual approach. Presenting a range of human interactions in domestic environments and revealing influences from Matisse to Francis Bacon, from Giacomo Balla to Niki de Saint Phalle, the prints receive in this book fascinating new commentary from Kentridge, who shares his working methods as well as personal memories of the prints’ subjects and creation.
Framed by detailed research by Warren Siebrits, the compiler of Kentridge’s upcoming catalogue raisonné of prints and posters, Domestic Scenes provides some of the earliest evidence of the artist “stalking the drawing”: returning to the etching plate time and again to make additions and alterations. The book features a tipped-in image and a pull-out poster.

This volume publishes the libretto of William Kentridge’s (born 1955) chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl, which was made for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma and first performed there in September 2019. Music for the opera was composed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd. The images and phrases were projected on variously sized screens in the opera, sometimes in sync with the sung text, sometimes independent of any sung text. In the opera production, the right-hand page generally featured text, and the left-hand page a mixture of drawings and the shadow of a dancer cast onto its surface.

William Kentridge: Waiting for the Sibyl includes more and different drawings than are used in the opera. This book is compiled and published in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, i.e. during a time in which it is not possible to perform the opera live. It is therefore undertaken in anticipation of the time when the opera can be seen in its full form.

In more than three decades, William Kentridge (born 1955) has produced an oeuvre spanning diverse mediums including animated film, drawings, prints and rare books, stage production and sculpture. A Poem That Is Not Our Own establishes a link between his early drawings and films from the 1980s and 1990s and his most recent work, bringing into focus the thematic complex of migration, flight, and processions in his oeuvre. It illustrates how these themes first emerge in Kentridge's early graphic work and grow more prominent over the years as he explores their potential in ever more opulent creations.

Included here are the first presentations of The Head & The Load, which premiered at the Tate Modern, London, in the summer of 2018. An extravagant production involving film projections, shadow play and an ensemble of performers, the sprawling procession, which defied conventional genre boundaries, shed light on a neglected chapter of history: Africa's role in World War I.

Published with UCCA and Marta and Cosentino.

To accompany William Kentridge's (born 1955) Notes Towards a Model Opera project in China, the artist's personal notebooks--filled with annotations, drawings and ideas--were meticulously reproduced in this eponymous publication to allow the reader into Kentridge's own thought process. With an in-depth profile of Kentridge by author Andrew Solomon, and essays by China art historian Alfreda Murck and UCCA director Philip Tinari, Notes Towards a Model Opera is a personal exploration of the layered meanings behind the aesthetics and ideals of socialist China as well as an exploration of the artist himself.

Covering 40 years of South African artist William Kentridge's (born 1955) internationally acclaimed production in drawing, stop-frame animation, video, prints, sculpture, tapestry and large-scale installation, Why Should I Hesitate stands as a definitive statement on his vast oeuvre. This deluxe production, published in an edition of 1,800 copies, is comprised of two slipcased volumes with a unique print in lapis lazuli, each copy stamped and numbered.

The title references Kentridge’s primary practice of drawing and how this core activity informs and enables his studio practice. It also references the impact of individual action on history and the reverse—how history shapes the contemporary and the future—and serves as a commentary on various shifting hegemonies of power politics, economies, language and the authority to narrate history.

In this book, the works of William Kentridge (born 1955) enter into dialogue with the grand narratives of civilization, based on the sculpture collection of Frankfurt's Liebieghaus, which spans 5,000 years, forming a quasi-fictitious guide to the collection.

Triumphs and Laments celebrates William Kentridge’s (born 1955) monumental frieze, drawn along the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, as well as the performance which inaugurated it. This reprint of Kentridge’s artist’s book serves as an illustrated guide to one of his most memorable and ambitious projects. Designed with the early Baedekers in mind, it acts as an essential component to viewing Kentridge’s erased-graffiti figures and to understanding the process of their creation. Gatefolds, a poster and a leporello of the frieze are included. The texts, which include a conversation between the artist and Carlos Basualdo, as well as two essays by Salvatore Settis and Gabriele Guercio, explore the meaning of the work and its resonance with the millennia-long history of Rome.

William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he continues to live and work. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Carnegie, and is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. A major retrospective co-organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago recently toured the U.S. and appeared in Capetown, South Africa. In 2005 his production of The Magic Flute opened at La Monnaie opera house in Brussels, Belgium.

Homi Bhabha is a central figure in cultural studies and has been invited to to deliver lectures around the world at important institutions, including The University of London, England, whilst holding a more permanent position at the University of Chicago and Harvard University since 1997.