William Kentridge

William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. He is especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s, constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second's to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.

Kentridge has created artwork as part of design of theatrical productions, both plays and operas. He has served as art director and overall director of numerous productions, collaborating with other artists, puppeteers and others in creating productions that combine drawings and multi-media combinations.

Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1955 to Sydney Kentridge and Felicia Geffen, a Jewish family. Both were advocates (lawyers) who represented people marginalized by the apartheid system. He was educated at King Edward VII School in Houghton, Johannesburg. He showed great artistic promise from an early age, and began taking classes with charcoal at age eight. In 2016, he became perhaps the first artist to have a catalogue raisonné devoted exclusively to his juvenilia.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and then a diploma in Fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation. In the early 1980s, he studied mime and theatre at the L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He originally hoped to become an actor, but said later: "I was fortunate to discover at a theatre school that I was so bad at being an actor [... that] I was reduced to an artist, and I made my peace with it." Between 1975 and 1991, he was acting and directing with Johannesburg's Junction Avenue Theatre Company. In the 1980s, he worked on television films and series as an art director.

Kentridge believed that being ethnically Jewish gave him a unique position as a third-party observer in South Africa. His parents were lawyers, well-known for their defence of victims of apartheid, which influenced his work. Much of his work also reflects South Africa's socio-political condition and history.

Kentridge has practiced expressionist art, where form often alludes to content and vice versa, and he uses both composition and media to develop the meaning of the work. Additionally, Kentridge has often used instances of social injustice in South Africa in his work. For example, Casspirs Full of Love, viewable at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, uses imagery of a casspir: a vehicle used in South Africa to put down riots.

By the mid-1970s, Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30 monotypes, which soon became known as the "Pit" series. In 1980, he executed about 50 small-format etchings which he called the "Domestic Scenes". These two extraordinary groups of prints served to establish Kentridge's artistic identity, an identity he has continued to develop in various media. Despite his ongoing exploration of non-traditional media, the foundation of his art has always been drawing and printmaking.

In 1986, he began a group of charcoal and pastel drawings loosely based on Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera. These works, which reflect a blasted, dystopic urban landscape, demonstrate the Kentridge's movement towards using the flexibility of space and movement.