William Kentridge: Exhibition Posters

A compelling argument can be made that Kentridge is, in fact, the most important printmaker working today. His graphic output will likely be regarded with the same reverence as the works of Albrecht Dürer, Francisco Goya, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Pablo Picasso. Kentridge's innovative approach has redefined printmaking as a contemporary art form. His work not only challenges traditional notions of the medium but also underscores its relevance in addressing complex and urgent themes. His prints are widely collected by institutions and continue to inspire artists around the world.

While printmaking per se is a central medium in Kentridge's work, he also produced a variety of posters over the course of his career, created in connection with his exhibitions, performances, and installations. These posters are more than simple promotional materials-they reflect the themes, visual language, and artistic methods central to his work-and draw on his significant skill and range as a printmaker.

This poster was created, in 1999, for the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. It commemorated the festival's 25th anniversary and marked a significant milestone in Kentridge’s career and South Africa’s post-apartheid cultural landscape.

The National Arts Festival is a multi-disciplinary festival that takes place annually in Makhanda, formerly known as Grahamstown. It is a major event on South Africa's cultural calendar and the largest annual arts celebration on the African continent. The festival presents the Young Artist Awards, which are given to emerging South African artists who have shown exceptional ability in their field. Kentridge won the award in 1987. 

The year this poster was produced was a significant year for William Kentridge. In 1999, he received the prestigious 53rd Carnegie Prize, the first filmmaker to do so, as well as producing Stereoscope, the eighth animated film in the seminal Drawings for Projection series. Significantly, in that year he also created Shadow Procession, an animated film which used three-dimensional objects and paper cut-out figures similar to those used in this work.

In a filmmaking practice that spans five decades Shadow Procession was created at a time when Kentridge was experimenting with different animation techniques. Techniques that he would continue to explore throughout his subsequent career. Shadow Procession involved a different technique to his more usual erasure animation where, instead of erasing and redrawing an image, he used paper cutouts to create animations in a similar stop motion process.

In these animated works Kentridge combines shadow figures with archival text, engaging with history, identity, and collective memory—key themes in the discussions on art in transitional societies. Scholars such as Griselda Pollock and Andreas Huyssen interpret Kentridge’s silhouettes as a response to historical amnesia and a gesture toward recovering marginalised narratives. The use of faded newspaper pages as a backdrop underscores his preoccupation with the instability of historical records, resonating with his Drawings for Projection series, where history, memory, and motion intersect to create layered narratives.

The above poster was created for an exhibition at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, in October 1999. The poster is based on the original drawing from the film, Stereoscope, part of the Drawings for Projection series which began in 1989, and was first shown, together with a selection of the drawings, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in April 1999. When the original drawing on which this poster is based was sold at auction in 2018, it achieved R6.6m and was at the time the highest price achieved for a drawing by the artist.

A stereoscope is a nineteenth-century optical instrument designed to approximate binocular vision. In this image, two forms of Soho Eckstein, the protagonist of the films, merge into a solitary figure—bowed and isolated—a recurring motif in the series that conveys introspection and vulnerability. The image features the series’ central character, an avaricious South African mining magnate, dressed in a pinstriped suit and tie. His counterpart, Felix Teitlebaum, though absent in form, is present by implication. Felix is typically portrayed naked, embodying vulnerability and serving as a representation of those exposed to the devastating impacts of apartheid.

These recurring characters double as the artist’s alter egos, with Eckstein and Teitlebaum navigating the fraught emotional and political landscapes of South Africa during and after the fall of apartheid. As the artist explains: “One of the things the films showed was that Soho and Felix were both close to me—not so much a self divided, but the artist as mediator between several different factions of the self. In Stereoscope, Soho divides in two…”

This 2007 poster for The Magic Flute serves as both a promotional piece and a conceptual extension of Kentridge’s production of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte. These working drawings and fragments were used in the creation of the scenic design and animation for The Magic Flute, the Mozart opera given brilliant interpretation by William Kentridge in a long-awaited production in 2005 which premiered at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels.

The work features three hand-drawn birds, rendered expressively in charcoal. The birds connect with the discordant ideas of freedom, captivity, and fragility. His adaptation of The Magic Flute interrogates Enlightenment ideals, exposing their contradictions when viewed through a postcolonial lens. The recurring motif of birds underscores the fragility of these ideals, challenging audiences to reconsider the opera’s meaning in light of other histories.

What Will Come, which ran from 10 November to 14 December 2007. The exhibition took its title from the Ghanaian proverb “What will come has already come,” reflecting Kentridge’s ongoing engagement with themes of history, memory, and fragmented perception.

The composition features mirrored imagery resembling a stereoscopic photograph, with a papier-mâché rhinoceros at its centre. Covered in collaged pages marked with anatomical notations and text fragments, the rhinoceros, with its reference to Albrecht Durer’s famous print, seemingly interrogates the antithetical narratives of Europe and Africa.

Kentridge is renowned for his animated films, created using his signature technique of multiple erasures, in which he explores human emotion, memory, and the complex interplay of cultural identity, history, and politics in South Africa. In What Will Come, he continued his investigation into the act of seeing, presenting a series of new drawings, prints, and stereoscopic images that delve into the construction of sight and optics. The centrepiece of the exhibition was an eight-minute anamorphic film, also titled What Will Come.

This film employs a technique of cylindrical mirror anamorphosis, where distorted images, drawn and animated by Kentridge, assume their correct form only when reflected in a mirrored cylinder placed at the centre of the projection. This approach draws inspiration from the picture puzzles of the sixteenth century, which relied on altered perspectives to reveal hidden images. Kentridge translates this historical fascination with perception into his film, requiring the viewer to engage with the cylindrical mirror to decode the distorted images.

The optical technique Kentridge employs relies on a deep understanding of mathematical principles and optical laws. The cylindrical mirror, with a precise radius, reflects and “straightens” the distorted images, transforming them into recognisable forms. By challenging the viewer’s perception, Kentridge highlights the ways in which vision is constructed and shaped by perspective, tools, and context.

William Kentridge’s Tear & Repair 2, created for the 2015 Design Indaba, reflects his ongoing exploration of fragmented narratives and reconstruction. The torn and reassembled pages, layered with hand-drawn figures, symbolise the cyclical processes of destruction and renewal, resonating with South Africa’s post-apartheid reconciliation. The torn, collaged texts emphasise the contested and fluid nature of historical narratives, while gestural ink strokes evoke the fragmented nature of memory. The title underscores Kentridge’s belief in history as nonlinear and provisional, with “tearing” representing historical violence and “repairing” signifying ongoing reconstruction.

In February 2015, the Cape Town City Hall auditorium hosted the South African premiere of Kentridge’s multimedia performance Refuse the Hour. The 80-minute chamber opera interwove a rich array of visual and sound elements, including dance by the late Dada Masilo, an original score by Philip Miller, video by Catherine Meyburgh, mechanical sculptures, vocal performance, and narration. The performance provided a multi-layered reflection on themes of time, memory, and history, central to Kentridge’s practice.

The individual vignettes in Tear & Repair 2 portray Kentridge and Dada Masilo, the acclaimed dancer and choreographer, in various stages of performance, reimagining history and engaging with South Africa’s process of reckoning.

Design Indaba produced a limited edition of 50 prints for the 2015 festival, featuring ink drawings derived from Refuse the Hour. The prints depict Kentridge in his trademark white shirt and black pants alongside Masilo, who played a key role in both Refuse the Hour and his related exhibition, The Refusal of Time. This particular print is remarkable because it bears an uppercase ‘KENTRIDGE’ signature, which the artist customarily reserves for unique works and signs prints with the title case ‘WJKentridge’ version of his signature. This work merges visual, narrative, and performative elements into a cohesive reflection on memory, history, and the passage of time.