Art, Design & Fashion
Landmark
William Kentridge
born 1955
Charcoal animation and internationally acclaimed installation art
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the South Africa Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He draws in charcoal, erases, redraws and films the erasure — an idiom of his own that has made him one of the most acclaimed artists working anywhere.
William Kentridge grew up in Johannesburg in a family of lawyers; his father Sydney represented the Biko family at the inquest and the defendants at the Treason Trial. He studied politics and African studies, then mime and theatre in Paris, and came to visual art by way of both.
His method is a single sheet of paper. He draws in charcoal, photographs it, rubs part of it out, draws again, photographs again — and the film that results carries the smudges of everything that was there before, so that the past is visibly still present in every frame. The Drawings for Projection series, following the property developer Soho Eckstein and the dreamer Felix Teitlebaum through late apartheid and after, is the core of it.
He has also directed opera — Mozart's Magic Flute, Shostakovich's The Nose and Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu — worked with the Handspring Puppet Company, and made large processional works including More Sweetly Play the Dance and The Head and the Load, about the African porters and carriers of the First World War. In Johannesburg he founded the Centre for the Less Good Idea as a space for other artists to try things that may not work.
He has had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitechapel and the Royal Academy, and holds the Kyoto Prize and the Praemium Imperiale.
His method is a single sheet of paper. He draws in charcoal, photographs it, rubs part of it out, draws again, photographs again — and the film that results carries the smudges of everything that was there before, so that the past is visibly still present in every frame. The Drawings for Projection series, following the property developer Soho Eckstein and the dreamer Felix Teitlebaum through late apartheid and after, is the core of it.
He has also directed opera — Mozart's Magic Flute, Shostakovich's The Nose and Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu — worked with the Handspring Puppet Company, and made large processional works including More Sweetly Play the Dance and The Head and the Load, about the African porters and carriers of the First World War. In Johannesburg he founded the Centre for the Less Good Idea as a space for other artists to try things that may not work.
He has had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitechapel and the Royal Academy, and holds the Kyoto Prize and the Praemium Imperiale.
- Museum of Modern Art — William Kentridge
- Wikipedia — William Kentridge
- Royal Academy of Arts — William Kentridge
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