It’s been three decades since pop modernist David Bowie, writing in Modern Painters in 1995, presciently hailed Johannesburg ‘city boy’ William Kentridge as the ‘white-heat high point’ of the first Johannesburg Biennale. The gushing notice, part of a wider chorus of acclaim, marked the start of the 40-year-old Johannesburg artist’s astonishing ascent into the global art world. The artist’s father, famed anti-apartheid lawyer Sir Sydney Kentridge, was not so easily persuaded.
‘How long will this last?’ the elder Kentridge pressed Johannesburg dealer Linda Givon. It was a fair concern. His artist son – married, three children – was still living in a run-down part of town, in a shared house with friends from a Marxist theatre collective. ‘Do you think William will carry on selling his work?’ Givon, never one to hedge, replied: ‘Of course. He is a genius. He always has other ideas and there is always a surprise.’
Now represented by a circle of elite dealers – including Swiss powerhouse Hauser & Wirth, currently showing his work in New York – Kentridge has more than delivered on Givon’s forecast. His 102-year-old father is surely satisfied. For his part, the artist is wary of praise. ‘It’s like opening your front door to find a wet rhinoceros,’ he once told me, quoting his wife, rheumatologist Anne Stanwix. ‘It’s very nice, but what do you do with it? I don’t know what that word means. If anything, genius means hard work.’
A Natural History of the Studio is Kentridge’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York since leaving Marian Goodman Gallery last year. It showcases the artist’s expansive understanding of labour. Spanning two floors of the gallery’s battleship-grey West 22nd Street building – Selldorf Architects shunned the district’s red-brick typology in favour of concrete blocks and zinc panels – the show gathers drawings and sculpture tied to Kentridge’s nine-part film series ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’, also on view. Down on West 18th Street, a companion show surveys his printmaking.
As is often the case with Kentridge, the profusion of stuff – charcoal drawings, bronze sculpture, etchings of Weimar dandies with coffee-pot heads – can obscure what is essential. The episodic film series is the anchor. By turns playful, digressive and philosophical, ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ offers a distillation of Kentridge’s methods and interests. It was shot in the artist’s suburban studio in Johannesburg.
The studio, for Kentridge, is both retreat and crucible, ‘a compression chamber’ in which ‘the world is taken apart and then put back together’, as he variously stated over the years. More practically, the artist’s high-ceilinged studio adjacent to his inherited family home in Houghton offered Kentridge sanctum to experiment with digital life during the Covid-19 lockdowns of the early 2020s. He hosted his first Instagram livestream in June 2020, but his heart remains with the analogue.
In 2024, he premiered the complete cycle of films in an installation curated by long-time collaborator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition recreated the artist’s studio, replete with drawing boards, a sousaphone and Arriflex film camera. Hauser & Wirth runs with this idea, offering an ever larger encounter with Kentridge’s ‘experiment in embodiment and phenomenological experience in the digital age’, to quote Christov-Bakargiev.
The first-floor display, orchestrated by set designer Sabine Theunissen, luxuriates in the artist’s drawings, showcasing more than 70 works on paper. And with a major Yorkshire Sculpture Park survey on the horizon (The Pull of Gravity, opens 28 June), A Natural History of the Studio also explores Kentridge’s shifting relationship between drawing and sculpture. Kentridge started making sculpture in 1984, petite figurative bronzes, but his ambitions with the medium grew after 2000.
‘Everything is kind of drawing,’ he told me in 2005 of the silhouette forms in bronze then touring various museums. These robust figurative works, which he referred to as ‘solidified drawings’, are the ancestors of his ‘Glyph’ (2017-) bronzes. On view at both Hauser & Wirth and the YSP in Wakefield, these recent works – derived from ink drawings and paper cut-outs – offer an expansion on Kentridge’s long-held understanding of sculpture as a form of drawing.
Both exhibitions are supported by new publications. Copies will travel back to Kentridge’s book-filled studio, joining a well-thumbed copy of Christov-Bakargiev’s 1998 Brussels show catalogue, still a vital resource for assistants. On a recent visit, the artist handed me a slim volume by poet and essayist Gérard Macé, How to Become William Kentridge (2020). His advice, quoting Proust: ‘Be faithfully antique and powerfully original.’ Not stated: ignore father, trust the studio.
William Kentridge’s ‘A Natural History of the Studio’ is on view at 542 West 22nd Street and 443 West 18th Street, New York, 1 May –1 August 2025.
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