William Kentridge

William Kentridge (b. 1955) is a world-renowned multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans printmaking, drawing, sculpture, writing, film, performance, music, theatre, and collaborative projects. Drawing forms the creative foundation of his work, whether it manifests as animated films, prints, collages, sculptures, tapestries, kinetic objects, or puppet-theatre pieces, resulting in an expansive and remarkably versatile oeuvre.

His work engages themes of politics, science, literature, and history, while simultaneously embracing contradiction and uncertainty. While many artists incorporate printmaking as a secondary aspect of their practice, Kentridge stands as a modern pioneer of the medium. Drawings and theatre projects frequently emerge from his prints, and vice versa, underscoring the centrality of printmaking within his broader practice. For Kentridge, printmaking is itself inherently multidisciplinary; he has described an etching as “an extraordinary, ridiculously complicated form of animation,” in which a single plate is continually reworked, producing multiple states over time.

The relationship between William Kentridge and David Krut began in 1992, when the pair met casually at the opening of an exhibition at The Market Theatre Gallery in Johannesburg. Kentridge was due to visit London for his first exhibition of drawings and prints at the Vanessa Devereaux Gallery in the Portobello Road area of London. Krut, who was based in London at the time, had developed a working relationship with master printer Jack Shirreff dating back to 1981 and he invited Kentridge to visit Shirreff at his 107 Workshop in Wiltshire to explore making very large copper plates, which would allow the artist to create editioned work on a scale that was not available to him in South Africa. From that point on, Krut became one of Kentridge’s primary publishers, working with him on print editions as well as book and other publications. Some early publications include the iconic large-scale Heads series, the General and Iris prints, the HMV series, the Baedecker series and Atlas Procession series. In 1998, Krut was the first to bring Kentridge’s work to the USA with an exhibition in Chicago, through which Kentridge’s work was placed in many important museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art. Krut continued this promotional activity with exhibitions in the USA, including in New York and Washington, throughout late-1990s and early-2000s. After Krut established his own print workshop in Johannesburg in 2002, Kentridge became a frequent collaborator with Master Printer Jillian Ross (and before her, Randy Hemminghaus) and her team at David Krut Workshop (DKW). Kentridge has worked with DKW on various large-scale print series’ including The Nose series from 2006-10, The Universal Archive from 2012-16, the Triumphs and Laments woodcut series from 2016-19, and ongoing the Studio Life series from 2019. Other collaborations include the Magic Flute series, Zeno Writing and various other prints that were created alongside Kentridge’s ongoing theatre and film productions.

Kentridge, who was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, is a multidisciplinary artist – a printmaker, painter, sculptor, director of theatre and opera, a draughtsman, animator and filmmaker. One might call him a maverick of the arts for the unparalleled ways in which he combines old and new artistic mediums, such as film and charcoal. While he does not define himself as a “political artist”, Kentridge is widely regarded as the go-to contemporary South African artist whose work cannot be detached from his country’s recent history and fraught present. While many artists dabble in printmaking on the side of their practice, Kentridge is a modern pioneer in the medium – drawings and theatre projects regularly emerge from his prints, and vice versa. For Kentridge, printmaking is in itself a multi-disciplinary practice, considering an “etching as an extraordinary, ridiculously complicated form of animation,” knowing that a single plate will constantly be reworked, resulting in several different states. One of the key characteristics of Kentridge’s practice is the inter-relatedness of his various forms of work. Often he is working on a multitude of projects simultaneously and so the works in one medium inform works in another, creating narrative strands running from project to project. When he is producing an opera, it’s probable that he is doing some drawings and prints on the way. The Nose series, for instance, was inspired by the adaptation of Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose, that Kentridge did for the Metropolitan Opera New York. The series contains traces of this opera as well as previous opera – Mozart’s The Magic Flute – print projects, such as L’Avanzata Inesorabile, and projects yet to come. As the winner of countless awards and honorary titles, Kentridge is considered one of the most important artists working today. His extraordinary range is acknowledged and credited for having “followed its own unique path, irrespective of contemporary fashions” (Ben Eastham for Apollo, vol. 182, no. 637, Dec 2015). Kentridge’s work is placed in hundreds of prestigious collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Gallery London. In 2017 Kentridge founded The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts, based in Maboneng, Johannesburg, with its eighth season taking place in mid-October 2021. His most recent solo exhibitions include MUDAM Luxembourg (2021); Musée Métropole d’art moderne in Lille (LaM) (2020); Norval Foundation and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2019–2020); and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2019). His upcoming projects include a substantial retrospective at The Royal Academy in London, from September to December 2022. He is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates from universities including Yale University, Royal Academy London, and the University of London, and has served as a visiting professor at Oxford University and the University of Rochester.

Artworks (428)

Westcoast Series

In 2010 Eben Sadie of Sadie Family Wines – a small, prestigious winery based in the southern Swartland, inland from Elands Bay on the Cape West Coast of South Africa – released a limited edition of six wines made using grapes harvested from vines that were planted in around 1900. The wine collection is called the Ouwingerdreeks (Old Vine Series) and the winery approached William Kentridge to create labels that would correspond with the fineness of the wines. The six images that Kentridge created for the labels are a combination of ink wash drawings and collage. In January 2010, Kentridge came into the David Krut Workshop to discuss the possibilities of translating the drawings into series of etchings with Master Printer Jillian Ross – a movement between media that is common within Kentridge’s practice. The five etchings that resulted build upon and modify the drawings on which they are based.

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The imagery in these prints is inspired by the visual and historical landscape of the Swartland region, and other valleys far up the West Coast in the Olifants Rivier region, where the vines were located. The prints were created through the full utilisation of techniques available to a printmaker. Delicate drypoint lines swirl through washes and splashes of pale grey spitbite aquatint, combined with the deep and solid marks of sugarlift aquatint and hardground etched lines. Handpainting, burnishing and attached fragile chine collé resolve the prints.

Some of the imagery of the prints will be familiar to followers of Kentridge’s work; the anthropomorphic objects proceeding across the landscape are reminiscent of works such as Portage (2000) and those of L’Inesorabile Avanzata (2007). In this series, Kentridge has reimagining these object-figures within the landscape of the Swartland and the tools of wine-making: the secateurs used to harvest the fattened bunches of grapes; the windmill that pumps life-giving water to the maturing vines; the world marching through the landscape on electric pylon legs. In Untitlted (Skurfberg), the landscape is untouched and unoccupied, and the use of hand-painting by the artist ensures variation within the edition. Finally, a nude female figure – perhaps an embodiment of the landscape pre-colonisation – undresses within the encircling arms of an imposing black chair.

Read Wine writer Tim James’s article about his experience of the visit to the Swartlands with Kentridge, Sadie and Kruger.