The Blue House Gallery, Parkwood | 21 November 2026 to January 2027
We are pleased to present a series of complex editioned works recently created by William Kentridge in collaboration with the David Krut Workshop (DKW) team of professional collaborators and fine art printers at our Arts on Main location in Maboneng, Johannesburg.
The exhibition foregrounds Kentridge’s sustained engagement with recurring subjects and ideas across different bodies of work, tracing how these are revisited and reinterpreted through the distinctive processes and possibilities of printmaking. Bringing together editioned works on paper connected to the artist’s multifaceted projects abroad, the presentation offers insight into how ideas migrate between mediums, acquire new meanings and evolve through material experimentation. It also highlights DKW as a site of ongoing collaboration, where the convergence of the artist’s ideas and the workshop’s experimental processes allows projects developed, and then presented outside of our borders in an international context, to evolve into considered series of editioned works in their own right, presented here in Johannesburg.
At the centre of this showcase is Kentridge’s most recent and ongoing collaboration with DKW, Vases for L’Orfeo (2026). The series is based on Kentridge’s painted ink drawings of ancient Greek vases, originally created in conjunction with his 2026 adaptation of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’Orfeo, first presented at the Glyndebourne Festival in the UK and then in Greece. The vases evoke the tragic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and their enduring love, drawing on its representation in ancient Greek pottery painting as well as Ovid’s seminal fifteen-book poem, Metamorphoses.
Alongside these recent works, the exhibition traces a longer history of collaboration, featuring works dating back to 2020. These include the Studio Life photogravure series (2020), ffollowed by a further body of gravure works, The Studio Life Series (2022), developed with senior collaborator Jillian Ross. After seventeen years at DKW, Ross returned to her home in Saskatoon to establish her own printmaking resources. The Old Gods Have Retired (2022) also emerged from this period of collaboration.
The exhibition further includes the six works in the series entitled Headlines (2025), created with a complex woodcut and digital reproduction of newspaper pages of the Zurich newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) in 1916 announcing the DADA Manifesto. This series was commissioned by art institutions in Germany in celebration of the artists 70th birthday and deals with the visual language and radical spirit of the Dada movement.
In Still Life with Fish Bowl (2025), a single copper plate gives rise to two distinct variations: a hand-painted version and a step-etched version. Kentridge’s work finds a resonance with the still-life compositions of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), renowned for his etchings. Morandi’s sensitivity to the subtle relationships between everyday objects, space and tonal variation offers a point of connection with Kentridge’s own approach to the genre. His distinctive use of cross-hatching, delicate linear marks and carefully modulated areas of light and shadow lends his compositions a remarkable sense of depth and quiet intensity, qualities that find an echo in Kentridge’s treatment of the still life.
The presentation also includes two related etchings from The Great Yes, The Great No (2024), which extend the collaborative relationship between DKW and Jillian Ross, who continues working with the workshop team consisting of Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim, Roxy Kaczmarek, Sbongiseni Khulu and Jesse Shepstone, whose combined experience represents more than fifty years of printmaking expertise.