William Kentridge

‘A Natural History of the Studio’ extends to Hauser & Wirth’s nearby 18th Street location with a selection of nearly thirty prints made by Kentridge over the last two decades. The artist first began printmaking while a student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the medium has been integral to his practice ever since. Kentridge has experimented with a broad range of techniques in this realm, from etching to lithography, aquatint, drypoint, photogravure and woodcut, observing that, ‘Printmaking…became a medium in which I could think, not merely a medium to make a picture... it has not been an adjunct to my other activities, but in many ways, it has been a central thread that has gone through the work I have done in the studio over the last 40 years.’

Many of the works on view at 18th Street revisit familiar personal iconography or directly reference other milestone projects, including the films on view at 22nd Street. The image of a typewriter, for example, dominates four print variations on view and is used as a metaphor for communication, historical record-keeping, and bureaucratic authority. Produced with master printmaker Mark Attwood in 2012 and given such titles as ‘The Full Stop Swallows the Sentence’ and ‘Undo Unsay,’ these works on paper are directly connected to Kentridge’s film ‘The Refusal of Time’ (2012), a thirty-minute meditation on time and space, the complex legacies of colonialism and industry, and the artist’s own intellectual life.

A series of lithographs titled ‘Portraits for Shostakovich’ (2022) was inspired by a 52-minute film made to accompany live performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No.10. Titled ‘Oh To Believe in Another World’ (2022), that project also serves as the subject of episode 8 of ‘Self-Portrait of a Coffee Pot.’ These colorful prints feature fractured portraits of Soviet intellectuals, members of the cultural avant-garde like the playwright and poet Mayakovsky, and politicians such as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

The presentation at 18th Street also includes four self-portraits. Made in collaboration with Jillian Ross Print in 2023, these works employ photogravure, drypoint, and hand-painting techniques with collaged elements of photographs, drawings, and fragments of text – an approach that in its insistent layering evokes the construction of self and identity as a continual work in process, intertwined with and shaped by socio-political forces.

Spanning two floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street building, ‘A Natural History of the Studio’ also extends to the gallery’s 18th Street location with a concise survey of Kentridge’s printmaking practice.