William Kentridge
Johannesburg, South Africa
ARTIST STATEMENT
William Kentridge works in a wide variety of
media from printmaking, drawing and painting to filmmaking with a unique
process of animation. In 2002, Kentridge was invited to Columbia University as
an artist in residence, and has since completed several print projects with the
Neiman Center. Using offset lithography, he created a large, graceful and
painterly portrait of a dancing couple (Middle Aged Love); with a
mastery of drypoint technique he created a print of a figure with a megaphone
and small typewriter; and with the processes of sugarlift, aquatint and
drypoint he made more than a dozen small images of old typewriters, a moose, a
globe, and a tree, all figurative work composed by his unfaltering hand and
graceful touch.
BIO
William Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa as an artist, designer, writer, actor and director. In 1976 he received a BA in politics and African studies from the University of the Witwatersrand and then studied art from 1976 to 1978 at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. Alongside his academic pursuits, Kentridge has been active in the theater since the mid-1970s. A founding member of the Junction Avenue Theater Company, established in 1975, he later worked with the Free Filmmakers Cooperative, established in 1988, and has continued his involvement with theater and film. Following his first solo exhibition, at the Market Gallery in Johannesburg in 1979, his work has been shown extensively throughout Europe and the United States, including recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Centre Georges Pompidu in Paris, and Castello di Rivoli in Rivoli, Italy. He is the recipient of various awards, including the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film Festival, the Carnegie Prize, the Sarjah Biennial Prize, and the Kaisserring prize from the Monchehaus-Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Golstar, Germany.