William Kentridge
William Kentridge
William Kentridge
Standing at a commanding yet personable stature, Tap (2024) and Pinstripe (2023) are captivating examples of William Kentridge’s ever-expanding and highly expressive vocabulary of Glyphs. Kentridge’s process for creating his impactful glyphs begins with charcoal drawings on found pages. These initial sketches evolve into black paper cut-outs – characterful paper constructions transformed into tactile objects – which become the blueprint for their bronze counterparts that range from intimately sized to monumental. These works explore the symbolic potential of language, inspired by logographic writing systems like Chinese characters, where a single symbol can represent not just a sound but an entire word or even a concept, fundamentally shaping the meaning of a sentence.
William Kentridge is internationally acclaimed for his artworks, theater and opera productions. His method combines drawing and erasing, tearing, gestural painting, collage, weaving, casting, writing, film, performance, music, theater and collaborative practices to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history, yet maintain a space for contradiction and uncertainty.
Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he currently lives and works, Kentridge grew up under the pall of apartheid. His practice has parsed and questioned the historical record—responding to the past as it ineluctably shapes the present—and created a world within his art that both mirrors and shadows the inequities and absurdities of our own. By employing varied mediums, Kentridge seeks to construct meaning through the use of historical resources, including maps, language and everyday imagery, while always maintaining a space for contradiction and uncertainty.
Tap (2024) and Pinstripe (2023) are on view through September 30, 2026.
Photos © Rossa Cole
© Sean Scully; Courtesy of Lisson Gallery
William Kentridge
Tap, 2024
Bronze
55 1/8 x 27 1/2 x 35 1/2 in / 140 x 70 x 90 cm
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
© William Kentridge
Kentridge’s Tap (2024) exemplifies his signature Glyphs, where a mundane object like a faucet merges with a humanised figure. This amalgamation of the inanimate tap, which forms the head of the sculpture, and the body whose fluttering coat is blown back by the haste of its movement, produces an absurd sympathetic character that at once evokes a sense of loneliness and dependability. The determined steps and angled body of the stoic figure instantly animates the inert materiality of the dense bronze, imbuing the smallest movements with the implication of life and dynamic action. This animated mode of storytelling weaves throughout his wider practice, which is thematically orientated around movement, transformation, and the tension between the static and the dynamic. As common throughout his oeuvre, the themes and motifs explored in this sculpture recur across his drawings, animated figures in his films, and various media.
An allegorical self-portrait, Pinstripe (2023) epitomises William Kentridge’s unique visual lexicon and multi-disciplinary approach. The powerful sculpture references one of Kentridge’s most famous fictional characters: the white South African property and mining magnate Soho Eckstein, who has featured heavily in the artist’s work since the 1980s, instantly recognisable thanks to his boxy pinstriped suit. In recent years, Soho has increasingly been interpreted as an alter ego of the artist; a coplex kind of self-portraiture that allows Kentridge to explore the difficult history of his native South Africa. ‘Pinstripe’ continuously evolves depending on a viewer’s vantage point. The torso of the figure is particularly ambiguous, its accordion-like pleats evoking a range of objects from early cameras to hospital curtains, both of which feature in various Soho Eckstein works. An arresting work that blurs history, fiction, and autobiography, ‘Pinstripe’ exemplifies the ‘lexicon of Kentridgean signs’ that underpin the artist’s celebrated oeuvre.
William Kentridge
Pinstripe, 2023
Bronze
55 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 37 3/8 in / 140.5 x 70 x 95 cm
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
© William Kentridge
William Kentridge
Tap, 2024
Bronze
55 1/8 x 27 1/2 x 35 1/2 in / 140 x 70 x 90 cm
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
© William Kentridge
Tap, 2024
Bronze
55 1/8 x 27 1/2 x 35 1/2 in / 140 x 70 x 90 cm
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
© William Kentridge
Photos © Rossa Cole