William Kentridge: 33 Years of Collaboration with Master Printers

William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg) is a multidisciplinary artist – a printmaker, painter, sculptor, director of theatre and opera, a draughtsman, animator and filmmaker. One might call him a maverick of the arts for the unparalleled ways in which he combines old and new artistic mediums, such as film and charcoal. While he does not define himself as a political artist, Kentridge is widely regarded as the go-to contemporary South African artist whose work cannot be detached from his country’s recent history and fraught present. While many artists dabble in printmaking on the side of their practice, Kentridge is a modern pioneer in the medium – drawings and theatre projects regularly emerge from his prints, and vice versa. For Kentridge, printmaking is in itself a multi-disciplinary practice, considering an etching as "an extraordinary, ridiculously complicated form of animation,” knowing that a single plate will constantly be reworked, resulting in several different states.

One of the key characteristics of Kentridge’s practice is the inter-relatedness of his various forms of work. Often he is working on a multitude of projects simultaneously and so the works in one medium inform works in another, creating narrative strands running from project to project. When he is producing an opera, it’s probable that he is doing some drawings and prints on the way. The Nose series, for instance, was inspired by the adaptation of Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose, that Kentridge did for the Metropolitan Opera New York. The series contains traces of this opera as well as previous opera – Mozart’s The Magic Flute – print projects, such as L’Avanzata Inesorabile, and projects yet to come.

As the winner of countless awards and honorary titles, Kentridge is considered one of the most important artists working today. His extraordinary range is acknowledged and credited for having “followed its own unique path, irrespective of contemporary fashions” (Ben Eastham for Apollo, vol. 182, no. 637, Dec 2015). Kentridge’s work is placed in hundreds of prestigious collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate Gallery London. In 2017 Kentridge founded The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts, based in Maboneng, Johannesburg, with its eighth season taking place in mid-October 2021. His most recent solo exhibitions include MUDAM Luxembourg (2021); Musée Métropole d’art moderne in Lille (LaM) (2020); Norval Foundation and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2019–2020); and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2019). His upcoming projects include a substantial retrospective at The Royal Academy in London, from September to December 2022. He is the recipient of numerous honorary doctorates from universities including Yale University, Royal Academy London, and the University of London, and has served as a visiting professor at Oxford University and the University of Rochester.