William Kentridge

All through history, people have woven tapestries to tell stories. A new one by South African artist William Kentridge, hanging in the Ermenegildo Zegna store on New Bond Street in London, tells several interconnected tales, including that of the visionary Italian entrepreneur Ermenegildo Zegna, who took his father’s looms and built a wool mill in...

William Kentridge. ‘Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work’. Tapestries. Installation view ©AnelWessels

As South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary artist, William Kentridge’s prolific and multi-disciplinary artistic output is known around the world, ranging from animation and drawing to printmaking, performance and music. Often South African audiences see his work only after it has toured internationally, as for the recent opening of ‘Tapestries’ at the Wits Art Museum in...

Tapestries: The Wits Art Museum (WAM) showed earlier this year an extraordinary collection of tapestries, created in conjunction with Marguerite Stephens’s weaving studio, plus associated works. Stephens and Kentridge have been working together on tapestries for the past 24 years. About 40 tapestries have emerged from this longstanding collaboration between the two studios, in which...