William Kentridge

Biography

William Kentridge works with a diverse array of media and techniques. He is known for charcoal drawings, prints, animation and sculptures that are shown in galleries, as well as for his role as director of performative works, such as operas and theatrical productions.

American art historian Rosalind Krauss has described Kentridge as a ‘post-medium’ artist whose approach to art making involves ‘inventing one’s own medium’, sometimes out of the materials and methods of seemingly obsolete technology or obsolescent genres.

Kentridge was born in South Africa in 1955. Since his earliest artworks in the late 1970s, his practice has been grounded in South Africa’s socio-political conditions (past and present) while drawing connections with broader concepts concerning ideology, history and memory. His works reveal the capacity for ideas and images to echo across time and between cultures.

Although Kentridge often deals with weighty political subjects, his approach is anything but didactic. Instead, he emphasises the ambiguity and uncertainty that is embedded in our relationship to history. He has stated being interested in ‘an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay’.

In 2018, the Art Gallery of New South Wales developed an exhibition of Kentridge’s work in collaboration with the artist and the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, Melbourne. Its title, That which we do not remember, alluded to the fugitive, mutable character of many of the artist’s works – to drawings that are erased and reworked or to the fleeting imagery of film fragments. It also emphasised the shortcomings of historical memory, gesturing, in the artist’s words, ‘toward that section of history that we should know, but don’t’.

Among the works by Kentridge in the Art’s Gallery’s collection is one of his most ambitious moving image works, I am not me, the horse is not mine 2008. An installation comprising eight video channels and a soundtrack by Philip Miller, it premiered at the 16th Biennale of Sydney in 2008 and was created by the artist during his development of a production of Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovic’s opera The nose 1928 for the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Emblematic of Kentridge’s ability to work across different media, it merges archival film fragments along with elements of drawing, collage, animation and footage from performance workshops for the opera.