The work of South African artist William Kentridge has since the 1970s traced a trajectory which meshes the personal and the political in an innovative use of charcoal drawing, animation, film and theatre. His work presents a nuanced view of current South African society and the fraught legacy of apartheid — from hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the traces of violence registered in the landscape around Johannesburg — refracted always through the prism of individual experience. In its evocation of the political in the private, his work stakes kinship with that of early twentieth century expressionists like Max Beckmann, or early Soviet artists and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein; its allegiance is to unanswered questions and unfinished business rather than neat solutions.

Kentridge constructs his distinctive animated films using a technique he has termed ‘stone-age filmmaking’; each animated sequence is produced in a process of successive alteration, erasure, overdrawing to a single drawing — which remains at the end of the process, testimony to all the moments of its making. In another sphere of production, several multi-media theatre projects have emerged from the collaborative work of Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company. Kentridge nonetheless sees his artistic production, whether films, theatre, or printmaking, as rooted in the activity of drawing.

Kentridge attracted international critical attention in 1997, when his work was featured in Documenta X in Kassel, and biennales in Johannesburg and Havana. In 1998, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, held a one-person show of Kentridge's work; in the same year, a substantial survey exhibition was seen at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, travelling thereafter to Kunstverein München in Munich (1998), Museu d'Arte Contemporani in Barcelona (1999), and the Serpentine Gallery in London (1999). Also in 1999, Kentridge presented Stereoscope, eighth in the Soho Eckstein film series, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and was included in d’APERTutto at the 48th Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Carnegie Prize at the Carnegie International 1999/2000 in Pittsburgh. 2001 saw the launch of a substantial survey show of Kentridge’s work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, travelling thereafter to New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, and Cape Town.

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, where he continues to live and work today.