By Mark Stiebel
William Kentridge is dominating the London autumn art scene with a massive exhibition at the Royal Academy, the largest ever held by an African artist in London.
He has an exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in London, he had a film premiere at the London Film Festival called “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot”, and he has been performing his Dada poem show “Ursonate”, delivering lecturers at the Royal Academy, staging a Centre for the Less Good Idea show called “To What End” at the Barbican, and his work was prominent at the annual Frieze art fair.
To say that Kentridge is on top of his game is an understatement, and he is now considered one of the world’s top living artists.
Kentridge is modest about his success. He credits his collaborators. He says as an artist it is not his job to provide meaning for his works, but they continue to be more relevant than ever, resonating with many current issues.
Kentridge’s art, like water, moves in directions never anticipated. His show at Goodman has an installation titled “Oh to Believe in Another World” which immerses us in four decades of Soviet domination with the dangers, the fear and the horrors.
The work, given the Russian special operation in Ukraine, could not be more relevant.
His new film, made in his studio during Covid-19, shows us exactly how these artistic creations come about with clouds of charcoal, constant reworking and repositioning.
The impact is dramatic and the technical skill impressive as he takes us behind the curtain into his studio to see the process of the art and how the ideas come from the edges, the periphery, and almost accidentally become relevant.
The film has some personal parts, with a very moving scene about his mother, Felicia Kentridge, the co-founder of South Africa’s Legal Resources Centre.
Kentridge challenges how we remember things, what we forget, what we embellish, and gives us a shortened version of all of his significant works, from musical phrases to drawn sequences staged in real life.
The film is parts one to three in a nine-part series and it’s an amazing portrait of Kentridge – how he works and how he thinks. It’s also very funny, uplifting and inspiring.
His Royal Academy show opened shortly after the funeral of the queen and his work “Her Absence Filled the World” from the 1990 film “Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old” stood out dramatically on a large wall of his drawings from various films and became immediately relevant and current.
The Royal Academy show is extensive in all of the 13 main exhibition rooms and they are transformed into the world of Kentridge.
His art is massive. His tapestries, trees and flower paintings all fit perfectly in the extremely high rooms.
Five of his “Drawings for Projection” films are shown in the same room, allowing new connections to be made as you watch them together at the same time.
The soundtracks and images and cork-lined walls transport you from London right into “Johannesburg (second greatest city after Paris)”.
A room of his early work is full of horror (the security police and the hand of apartheid are everywhere) and humour (the hyena is on roller skates).
Another room has significant work from his films and another his studio and his colonial landscapes.
One of the main rooms is devoted to “Black Box”, a rarely seen work which is a miniature theatre with electronic puppets and projection which highlights the genocide in Namibia of the Hereros in 1904, the first genocide of the century.
Kentridge’s film “Ubu Tells the Truth”, which has been on display at the Tate Modern until recently, is shown in a large room covered with large images of rhinos, radios, skeletons and with a bomb placed above the door – all drawn in charcoal by Kentridge directly onto the walls of the Royal Academy.
The most moving piece is “Waiting for the Sibyl” which was recently performed in London in April, where the stage is set up with projections and with the mournful music by Kyle Shepherd and the most beautiful and haunting lament of Nhlanhla Mahlangu, who is stopping visitors in their tracks and reducing others to tears.
The Royal Academy is good at putting on blockbusters, and this show has the full range of his retrospective work across a 40-year career that follows shows by some of the world’s most important living artists – Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei and Antony Gormley.
It’s vast: all the key themes of the destructive powers of apartheid, colonialism and communism are featured and made more ironic in some cases because of the setting. Overall, you are left amazed by the hours and hours of work and energy which went into making these sculptures, tapestries, films, installations and drawings. His legacy is now firmly in place as one of South Africa’s greatest artists. When you step back you see a man with a stick of charcoal working his magic.
William Kentridge is at the Royal Academy London until December 11 and at the Goodman Gallery until November 12.
He opens a major show at The Broad, Los Angeles, in November,
His World War I work, “The Head and The Load“, will be performed in Miami in December and will finally be staged in Johannesburg at the Joburg Theatre (after a Covid-19 postponement) from April 21 to May 6, 2023.
Mark Stiebel, Head of Art Law, Hunters Law LLP, London.
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