The absurd, “with its rupture of rationality – of conventional ways of seeing … is in fact an accurate and productive way of understanding the world… .” Recall these words of William Kentridge as you admire his great tapestry in Zurich’s main entrance hall. Coveted by collectors, his tapestries, drawings, sculptures, animated films, even stage...
In an age of video, film and electronic art, traditional tapestry weaving might seem archaic, even irrelevant to the pace of modern life. Yet William Kentridge’s bold, psychologically disturbing tapestries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art dramatically revivify a medium often regarded as primarily decorative. Kentridge didn’t produce these textiles by himself. He provided the...
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...
The gentility of the bourgeois boudoir and boardroom to the realpolitik ‘on the ground’ has been the four-decade long journey of South Africa’s most significant and globally capped visual artist, William Kentridge. While so much of the focus of the dual retrospective exhibitions, Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work, and Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture,...
William Kentridge. ‘Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work’. Tapestries. Installation view ©AnelWessels