Kentridge, William

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg as the son of Jewish anti-apartheid lawyers; his work is inextricably linked to the brutality of South Africa’s apartheid regime, as well as to colonialism, violence, and flight. His works cannot be reduced to a single genre; rather, the artist moves between graphic art, film, sculpture, theater, and opera.

Using the technique of erasure, Kentridge invented a completely unique style of animated film. He uses a single sheet of paper and a charcoal drawing, which he alters slightly by smudging or erasing before photographing it again, frame by frame. As a result, every previous stage remains visible on the screen as a gray, ghostly shadow.

Over the years, recurring motifs have emerged from his drawings, erasings, and over-drawings, motifs that Kentridge calls glyphs and which he assembles into a kind of visual alphabet. Thus, the megaphone becomes a symbol of state propaganda and loud street protests, while a procession of people represents flight, displacement, and the course of history.

For him, his sculptures are nothing more than bronze glyphs – three-dimensional words that can be combined to ever-changing sentences. It is these recurring glyphs that hold this artist’s multifaceted work together in a single, cross-media language.