William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity

The first UK institutional show dedicated to Kentridge’s sculpture is joyfully approachable while maintaining its critical bite, as we are drawn into his creative imagination

William Kentridge, Laocoön (Plaster), 2021. © William Kentridge. Courtesy Kentridge Studio, Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
28 June 2025 – 19 April 2026

by TOM DENMAN

A writhing contortion of carved-out, nailed-together loops of wood, thinly painted white, stands tall on four legs in the middle of the room. Like a dinosaur’s skeleton, perhaps, though William Kentridge has titled this work Laocoön (Plaster) (2021), and now I see the resemblance to that classical sculptural group in the Vatican. On the adjacent wall is its shadow, made of torn and collaged sheets of cardboard, painted black, scoured and numerated in white chalk. The numbers and cartographic arrangement of components might make you think you are looking at a mock-up. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. What came first, the shadow or the thing itself? Nearby, on a low wooden table, is Goat (2021), similar to the monumental sculpture, except it is painted black and has a goat’s head attached to one end. On the wall is Cursive (2020): shelves with small bronzes of almost equal size, so deftly made I imagine a single piece of bronze balletically morphing from one liminal form to the next: a not-quite coffeepot, a not-quite torso, a globe with a coffeepot lid protruding at one end and trouser legs at the other, walking.

William Kentridge, The Pull of Gravity, 2025. © William Kentridge. Courtesy Kentridge Studio, Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

In his series of short films Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (2020-24), Kentridge says: “Possibility and inevitability. These are the two poles between which drawing hovers and moves.” The sentence sums up my experience of visiting his joyfully approachable exhibition of three-dimensional work at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which centres on the mystical touchstones of Kentridge’s art: lightness and weight, the sense of play and of inevitable return – in this case to the coffee pot, or to the seemingly random squiggle that resolves itself in various animal forms in the mind of the viewer and the artist. That it is titled after one of the most archetypal sculptural groups in the history of western art reflects its embeddedness in the algorithm of his creativity, a faculty which, Kentridge wants to tell us, is both within and beyond our control.

William Kentridge, Semaphone (left) and Bicycle Wheel III (double megaphone), 2012, © William Kentridge. Courtesy Kentridge Studio, Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Hence the centre of this show is the studio – which is, Kentridge says, “a kind of enlarged head, in which, instead of an idea moving three centimetres from one part of the brain to another, one has the 5 metre, 7 metre, 9 metre walk from one part of the studio to another.” Accordingly, the park’s galleries immerse us in a spatialisation of the artist’s endlessly splintering creative process. The first works one encounters originated as kinetic sculptures in Kentridge’s 2012 performance Refuse the Hour; here they are props initiating the theatrics of our immersion. Bicycle Wheel III (double megaphone) (2012) consists of a pair of megaphones attached to a wheel atop a system of chains and handles and a wooden tripod with castors, setting a tone of ruleless, alchemical play. In what is the first UK institutional show dedicated to Kentridge’s sculpture, the three-dimensional emphasis – with all these strangely personable things that come to life – prompts us to join the artist in a semi-collaborative act of magical worldbuilding. To this never-quite-final end, material and imaginary are constantly competing – not least in Ladder Horse (2023), an equine sculpture seemingly made from a dismantled stepladder, metal clamps and cardboard but which is in fact a bronze cast painted to trick the eye.

William Kentridge, Lexicon, 2017. © William Kentridge. Courtesy Kentridge Studio, Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

I continue along the corridor – populated by larger versions of the glyphlike works on the shelves beside Laocoön – with a window facing the park along one side and three vibrant galleries along the other. I feel as if I am walking through one of Kentridge’s stop-motion animations in which a charcoal drawing is added to and subtracted from, the image never quite resolved, always giving way to another, and proliferating beyond itself through reproduction, fission, collage and sometimes, when the artist wipes it away, revealing an image underneath. This dynamic of ceaseless creation is felt in the Laocoön room especially, and in a gallery dedicated to Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (which includes plenty of such animations), which Kentridge began making during the Covid-19 pandemic and shows him – often with a double version of himself, superimposed into the footage – deliberating over what it is to create art, what the studio is, what it does. With the episodes playing in one corner, much of the room is a replica of his studio as it appears in them.

William Kentridge, Studio Horse, 2020. © William Kentridge. Courtesy Kentridge Studio, Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The main aspect of his studio – at least as it appears in the films – we find here is a sculpture of a horse made out of repurposed tripod legs and a saddle, plinthed on a crate used for transporting such artworks; on the wall behind it are printed pages and an 18th-century (Spanish) imperial map, as well as a photographic print of the artist himself, seated on a charcoal and ink horse aligned with the sculpture (so that, seen square-on, the artist appears to be sitting on the sculpture itself, as he does in the film). The reference to militarist colonial monuments – and the capitalistic circulation of goods as fundamental to empire and its legacies – is typical of the South African artist’s non-declaratory, and yet intelligent and informed, approach to politics. He is testing, it seems, the inherence of political symbolism in a horse-mounted white man. How little or how much is required for an image to be political? And if it is political, what is it saying? Forever teasing the threshold of actuality and representation, image and thing, Kentridge poses such questions only to leave them open-ended, like one of his bronze coffeepots that become cats depending on the angle from which you look at them.

William Kentridge, Paper Procession (III), 2024. © William Kentridge. Courtesy Kentridge Studio, Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The more time I spend here the more the politics of monumentality come into view. One room presents Fire Walker (2009), a sculpture – co-designed with Gerhard Marx – of a roaming street vendor with a brazier on her head (in Johannesburg, such vendors would carry braziers in this way, taking them down to cook food for passersby). It is made of sheets of rusted steel bolted together – resembling pieces of paper or card that the artists may well have torn to make the original maquette – and supported by clamps. Magnificent and yet smaller than life size, the object stands on a table. The sheets appear to be shifting, cubistically abstracting the figure’s movement that we can only recognise as a depiction when we see it from the side. Another version of it, 11 metres in height, is near Queen Elizabeth Bridge in Johannesburg, a monument commemorating a bygone trade practised by the city’s poorest residents that is also arguably an anti-monument, since it is presented in a state of irresolution. It does not celebrate social progress having been achieved, but hints at the need to keep working at it.

William Kentridge, Paper Procession (II), 2024. © William Kentridge. Courtesy Kentridge Studio, Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

I try to keep Fire Walker in mind when looking at Paper Procession (2024), six massive, jubilant sculptures, some red, some yellow, dancing on the grassy verge outside. They, too, are anti-monumental in the way they embody the riotous play that defies their solidity and weight, appropriate to the joy and fun of a day out on Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s idyllic grounds – far-removed, we might feel, from the context of downtown Johannesburg. But perhaps the ever-nuanced, tricksterish Kentridge is asking us to reconsider that assumption: to enjoy ourselves by all means, but also to think about the transience and costs, and the broader historical and geographic repercussions, of our diversion.