William Kentridge

Background

William Kentridge was born on April 28, 1955, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a son of Sydney Kentridge and Felicia Geffen, both lawyers who struggled against the apartheid regime.

Education

William Kentridge was growing up during one of the hardest and controversial periods in the history of South Africa, the apartheid policy.

After finishing King Edward VII School in Houghton, Johannesburg, Kentridge entered the University of the Witwatersrand in 1973. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and African Studies three years later. Then, he spent a couple of years at the Johannesburg Art Foundation which provided him with a diploma in Fine Arts.

From 1981 to 1982, William Kentridge traveled to Paris where he studied mime and theatre at the École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq (Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School).

In 2004, Kentridge received an Honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Career

William Kentridge started his career in the middle of 1970s. At first, he tried his hand as an actor, playwright, and set designer. In 1975, he became a director of Johannesburg's Junction Avenue Theatre Company. He held the post till 1991.

During this period of time, the artist also experimented with prints and drawings which formed the base of his subsequent career. By the end of the decade, he produced a series of 30 monotypes titled ‘Pit’. It was followed by ‘Domestic Scenes’ which gathered fifty small-sized etchings. A couple of these works consolidated Kentridge’s status in the art community. Another series of visual artworks which demonstrated his interest in the flexibility of space and movement appeared in 1987. A number of drawings made with charcoal and pastel represented the depictions of blighted metropolitan landscapes.

Kentridge’s permanent experiments with media finally led him to express his artistic views through filmmaking. So, throughout the 1980s, he served as an art director of television films and series. In 1988, he strengthened relationships with this form of art by co-founding Free Film-makers Co-Operative in his native Johannesburg.

It was then when he initiated a series of short films with the first animated movie ‘Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris’. By 2003, the number of items in the project attended nine films which were gathered under the title ‘9 Drawings for Projection’. The rest of the animated movies included ‘Monument’, ‘Mine’, ‘Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old’, ‘Felix in Exile’, ‘History of the Main Complaint’, ‘Weighing and Wanting’, ‘Stereoscope’, ‘Tide Table’ and ‘Other Faces’. All the movies represented the successions of his own charcoal drawings always placed on the same sheet of paper, unlike the commonly used animation technique where each image had its own sheet.

In 1992, William Kentridge started to work with Handspring Puppet Theatre in Cape Town. The ongoing collaboration has resulted in a great number of multimedia performances. The international acclaim came to the artist five years later after he demonstrated his artworks at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, and at the Johannesburg and Havana Biennials. The popularity provided him with a post of a filmmaker which he occupied at Stereoscope in 1999. Three years later, Kentridge’s film ‘Shadow Procession’ was demonstrated on the NBC Astrovision Panasonic screen in Times Square.

Another field of art in which William Kentridge has applied his talent is stage decoration in opera and theatre. While working in these art spaces, he has also contributed to stage direction and the puppet world. As a director, Kentridge has presented to the public his interpretations of Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria’ (The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland), Mozart’s ‘Die Zauberflöte’ (The Magic Flute) and Shostakovich ‘The Nose’. He has also worked on the decoration for the show ‘Telegrams from the Nose’ in collaboration with the French composer François Sarhan.

The latest theatrical projects of Kentridge include a couple of Alban Berg’s operas, ‘Lulu’ staged for the first time in 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and a 2017 ‘Wozzeck’ which premier took place in 2017 at the Salzburg Festival. The 2019 Holland Festival was opened with a grand Kentridge’s spectacle ‘The Head and the Load’ which tell about the hardships of millions of African porters and carriers during the First World War.

In addition to drawings, movies and opera performances, William Kentridge has also created a number of tapestry series in collaboration with the Johannesburg-based Stephens Tapestry Studio, many sculptural compositions, both small-sized and large scale, like ‘Fire Walker’ placed in Johannesburg and ‘Il cavaliere di Toledo’ in Naples, Italy, and a huge 2016 mural along the right bank of the river Tiber to celebrate the legendary foundation of Rome in 753BC.

William Kentridge has presented his artworks and performed worldwide during his artistic career, including the major shows at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Tate Gallery in London, the Goetz Collection in Munich, Documenta exhibitions, and the Sydney Biennale. His opera and theater productions have been staged at the New York Metropolitan Opera, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Standard Bank National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa, and Avignon Festival in France among others.

Nowadays, William Kentridge lives and works in his native Johannesburg, South Africa.

Achievements

• William Kentridge is considered as one of the most notable South African artists due to the political content of his works and the non-traditional techniques he uses to create them. Many of his works are often compared to the art Honoré Daumier, Francisco de Goya, and William Hogarth.
  
  As an artist who has made a great contribution to various fields of art at once, he has been a recipient of such awards like the Carnegie Prize, the Kaiserring Award, the Red Ribbon Award for Short Fiction, and Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy among others. In 2013, Kentridge was named a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters.
  
  The same year, Kentridge’s artwork ‘PROCESSION’ was purchased at Sotheby's in New York City for $1,538,500.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • Casspirs Full of Love

  • North Pole Map

• drawing

  • UNIVERSAL ARCHIVE: REF. 29

  • Concerning Narrative

  • Embarkation

  • Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot

• etching

  • Reeds

• installation

  • Notes Towards a Model Opera

  • Notes Towards a Model Opera

  • Kinetic Sculpture Bicycle Wheel with Two Megaphone

  • Right Into Her Arms

• painting

  • Nose on Rearing Horse II

• print

  • Art in a State of Grace

  • Art in a State of Siege

  • Art in a State of Hope

• sculpture

  • Lexicon Medium Bronze (Knight)

  • Carrier Pigeon

  • Processione di Riparazioniste

  • Roman Head 1

  • Sister Box

  • Megaphone

  • Lexicon, Paragraph II

  • Sister Fan

  • Bird 1

  • Open

Views

William Kentridge's art reflects the nature of Kentridge's South Africa, a country still in the midst of social upheaval. The artist began making animations in the late eighties, just before the downfall of South Africa's racist apartheid government, and he has continued his work throughout the country's struggle toward democracy. Kentridge depicts the struggles of a people burdened by their history.

Different political and social issues in the artist’s animated movies are represented through the prism of his own point of view, sometimes autobiographical because he often includes his self-portrait in many of his creations.

Quotations: "My work is about the provisionality of the moment."

"In the same way that there is a human act of dismembering the past there is a natural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events. In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The very term 'new South Africa' has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new."

"Purely in the context of my own work I would repeat my trust in the contingent, the inauthentic, the whim, the practical, as strategies for finding meaning. I would repeat my mistrust in the worth of Good Ideas. And state a belief that somewhere between relying on pure chance on the one hand, and the execution of a programme on the other, lies the most uncertain but the most fertile ground for the work we do [...]. I think I have shown that it is not the clear light of reason or even aesthetic sensibility which determines how one works, but a constellation of factors only some of which we can change at will."

Membership

William Kentridge was named a Master Artist Resident of Italian Civitella Ranieri Center.

• Civitella Ranieri Center , Italy

  2000

Connections

William Kentridge is married to an Australian-born Anne Stanwix. She is a medical specialist in rheumatology. William and Anne have three children.

Father:

Sydney Kentridge

Mother:

Felicia Geffen

Wife:

Anne Stanwix

colleague:

Philip Miller

colleague:

François Sarhan

References

• William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises The book considers how renowned artist William Kentridge spins the material operations of the studio into a web of politically astute and historically grounded metaphors, likening erasure to forgetting, comparing animation to the flux of history, and marshaling drawing as a form of nonlinear argument.
  2018
• William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time
  2013
• William Kentridge: Fortuna A rich and compelling survey of one of the most significant artists at work today, supplemented by a chronology that includes Kentridge's key solo and group exhibitions as well as his film and theatrical performances.
  2013
• William Kentridge: Triumphs and Laments The volume celebrates the artist’s monumental frieze, drawn along the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, as well as the performance which inaugurated it.
  2018
• William Kentridge Critical texts and interviews that explore the drawings, animations, and theatrical work of the South African artist William Kentridge.
  2017