William Kentridge

An internationally renowned artist, William Kentridge was born in 1955 in South Africa. He lives and works in Johannesburg. Combining fine arts, performance, theatre, and opera, for over thirty years he has developed a polymorphic, dreamlike, political, and humanist body of work. Inspired by Dada theatre and the cinema of Méliès, his first animation films, created in the 1980s, laid the foundations of his formal vocabulary. His installations, films, and drawings deal with the political situation of the world, apartheid, and figures often trapped by their fates owing to the consequences of colonialism.

The artist’s artworks are featured in major contemporary collections and art museums, including the New York MoMA, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His spectacle-performance The Refusal of Time has been the subject of a first publication in 2012 and presented at the Festival d’Avignon, the 13^thdocumenta in Kassel, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other prestigious festivals and venues.Followed by The Head & the Load in 2020 which has been presented in London and New York and will travel to the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, in 2021.