At YSP William Kentridge Asks What We Can Trust in Image and Memory

William Kentridge works with drawing, sculpture, tapestry, film, theatre, opera, and writing—exploring all manner of material, from paper to clay to bronze. His creations move and migrate between media and criss-cross time lucidly. And his multidisciplinary practice has left a distinct mark on contemporary visual culture, reshaping how we think about image, memory, time.

A native of Johannesburg, and the son of prominent anti-apartheid lawyers (his father represented Nelson Mandela), Kentridge’s practice is inevitably entangled in the socio-political history of South Africa and the wider world. Yet he rejects the idea of offering fixed truths. Instead, his work constantly questions the grand narratives of history, politics, science, literature, and music—opening up spaces that interrogate the legacies of colonialism and power, and invite multiple ways of seeing.

“William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity” dips into the artist’s visionary world. Staged across the indoor gallery and the lawns of Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the north of England, the exhibition features 40 works made between 2007 and 2024. They join a distinguished lineup of sculptures in the park’s landscape, including works by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink, and James Turrell.

This is the first museum presentation for Kentridge outside South Africa to focus on his sculptures. He says, “I never thought of myself as a sculptor, but I had worked a lot with shadows in performance and in drawings and I was interested in the possibility of making something like a shadow—so ephemeral and without any substance—to be solid.”

At the heart of the exhibition is “Paper Procession”, a new YSP commission featuring six monumental, brightly colored sculptures that appear to be paper thin but are in fact made from painted aluminium panels fixed to steel armatures. They parade human-like outdoors along a century-old yew hedge and are joined in the main YSP park by four of the artist’s largest bronzes.

The idea for the new commissions “derived from anxiety,” he tells me. “I had to find something for this place and it happened innocently.” Like much of his work, the sculptures evolved intuitively—from flat paper puppets to freestanding forms to these towering outdoor figures.

The central YSP gallery features two major video works shown in rotation. “More Sweetly Play the Dance” (2015) is a hauntingly moving and strangely beautiful silhouetted procession of figures—a brass band, skeletons, refugees—referencing displacement, disease and endurance. “Oh To Believe in Another World” (2022) takes an even darker, more politically charged turn. Set to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No.10 (a work long associated with the composer’s fraught relationship with Stalin) the film interrogates the tension between artistic freedom and totalitarian control.

In the past, Kentridge has spoken of art’s role in giving a sense of agency in the world—for the maker and the viewer. Here music becomes a lens for thinking about the artist as witness, as resister, as someone navigating between public history and private reckoning.

YSP brings in visitors from all walks of life who come for the art, the beautiful walks and scenery, and for a day out. It also attracts large numbers of school children from nearby cities, many of whom may not have been exposed to art, and certainly not contemporary art.

I ask Kentridge how it feels to be exhibiting here. “With these sculptures its not like looking at an old master, where we think there’s no possible way I could imagine making this. With my sculptures you can see very clearly how things are constructed, how they’re put together. And visitors may think: I too can also be an artist.”

“The Pull of Gravity” is a thoughtful show, with a curatorial approach that highlights Kentridge’s constant movement across disciplines. He is also a committed collaborator, and you sense that at YSP—just as you sense the movement of ideas from one exhibition space to the next—often sparked, he says, by a studio member’s particular talent or a material’s own response to form.

Kentridge speaks of provisional coherence as the concept central to his practice: that meaning, form, even understanding are never fixed and certainly never absolute. Coherence, for him, emerges through process, through these layers and fragments that come together for a moment, only to shift again. It’s a kind of order that remains open to change, to revision, and is always shaped by its context.

To my mind, be it in two or three dimensions, Kentridge’s work is always collage. This is how he sees the world, and it is fundamental to how he would like us to view the world since collage requires us to understand the world as fragmented. And it is precisely this that makes Kentridge’s work so exciting and so right for our black-and-white, left-or-right, painfully polarizing times.

“Things that seem so clear are clear for a moment,” he tells me when I probe him on the concept, “and then the clarity disappears and you have to find a different kind of clarity.” This is work that adamantly refuses to instruct or be didactic. Instead, it gestures toward hope, brimming with poeticism, beauty and metaphor.

As an artist in constant engagement with societal concerns, I ask if he has hope in a world that, for many of us, feels increasingly dark and difficult to digest. His face grows serious as he tells me, “I have both hope and pessimism—both running together. I think to have only one or the other is to blind yourself to part of the world and say, everything can only be a disaster. It blinds you to many things that are happening. And to say everything’s for the best, blinds you to disasters that are very, very present.”

It is this holding of contradictions—beauty and brutality, doubt and belief—that makes Kentridge’s work resonate so widely. “I’m interested in moments of clarity,” he says, “but ones that don’t pretend to last.” And the YSL show invites us to sit inside uncertainty, and to think, to feel, and to keep looking.

“William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity” is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from June 28, 2025 to April 19, 2026.

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