William Kentridge

2012/2013 Visual Arts Mentor

Published in 2011

A visual artist whose creativity has led him to other media, William Kentridge, 56, is acclaimed for his compelling work that meshes the personal and political influences on his life in South Africa during and after apartheid. “I am interested in a political art ... an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings,” says Kentridge whose parents, anti-apartheid lawyers, taught him to question the world around him.

After earning a degree in politics from Witwatersrand University in 1976, Kentridge spent the next decade pursuing his interests in both drawing and theatre, studying at the Johannesburg Art Foundation and the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and working with the Junction Avenue Theatre Company.

By the late 1980s, Kentridge had begun the oeuvre for which he has become best known – an innovative fusion of charcoal drawing, animation, film and theatre, including the animation based on a succession of drawn, erased and redrawn charcoal images that he created for multi-media theatre pieces made with the Handspring Puppet Company, and his celebrated “Nine Drawings for Projection” film series.

In the last year, Kentridge’s work has been seen at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Scala in Milan, MoMA New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna and the Louvre and Jeu de Paume in Paris. He was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2009. In 2010, he received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, and, in 2011, was elected as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2010, a major retrospective, William Kentridge: Five Themes, was held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, while the premiere of his staging of Shostakovich’s The Nose took place at the Metropolitan Opera. “It is hard to remember when a visual artist has cut such a wide swath in the city’s cultural life, or spanned so many disciplines with such aplomb,” said Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker.