William Kentridge is one of the world's most engaging contemporary artists, renowned for exploring the essence of humanity through both historical and everyday themes. This book invites readers to "listen to the echo"-to engage with the resonance of Kentridge's multidisciplinary practice. Spanning more than four decades, it presents works ranging from his early printmaking and drawings, which laid the foundation for his animated film series "Drawings for Projection," to recent installations confronting apartheid, colonialism, social upheaval, and collective memory.
Major works such as the panoramic video installation More Sweetly Play the Dance and the woodcut series "Triumphs and Laments" use the motif of the procession as a powerful metaphor for change. The book also features The Centre for the Less Good Idea, a Johannesburg-based performance incubation space co-founded by Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace, which takes its impulse from Kentridge's experimental and open-ended approach to making. With recent works like the three-channel film installation To Cross One More Sea and new sculptures from the series "Paper Procession," this volume captures the breadth and depth of Kentridge's practice-at once critical, poetic, personal, and always profoundly collaborative.
Co-published with Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
On the occasion of his 70th birthday, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the Museum Folkwang in Essen are dedicating a major double exhibition to William Kentridge, who works in an interdisciplinary manner. Works from four decades will be shown: early graphic series on apartheid and its end, but also drawings and films from the famous series "Drawings for Projection" (1989-2020), in which Kentridge addresses the history of his hometown of Johannesburg. The importance of the procession in his work is reflected in the monumental video installation "More Sweetly play the Dance" (2015) and the large-format woodcut series "Triumphs and Laments" (2016-2019).
Particularly important in Kentridge's work is his artistic examination of colonialism, but also of social utopias and their failure using the example of Soviet socialism. Recent works from the context of 'The Great Yes, The Great No' (2024), a chamber opera created in cooperation with the 'Centre for the Less Good Idea' in Johannesburg, founded by Kentridge, once again show the enormous artistic range of his artistic work.
