William
Kentridge

William Kentridge, born in 1955 in Johannesburg (South Africa), is an internationally acclaimed artist who has a keen interest in animation films, theater and opera productions, as well as fine arts such as charcoal drawings, collages, and engravings. "Staging" is the keyword of his practice, which, in recent years, has evolved towards immersive and theatrical works, making him a total artist. A virtuoso of moving images, his politically and poetically charged works denounce apartheid and postcolonial history. Kentridge describes his practice as "political art, that is, ambiguous, contradictory, unfinished, oriented towards specific purposes: an art of measured optimism that rejects nihilism."

In 2010, a retrospective of his work was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art, which was presented at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. His installation, "Carnets d'Egypte," was shown in 2011 in the Department of Graphic Arts and Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre. Recently, the artist presented a performance inspired by Shostakovich's opera "The Nose" at the Louvre Auditorium.

In 2020, the LaM (Villeneuve d'Ascq) dedicated a solo exhibition to him entitled "Un poème qui n'est pas le nôtre." In 2021, the Mudam devoted a major retrospective to him titled "More Sweetly Play The Dance," on the occasion of which Editions Dilecta co-published with the museum a dialogue between William Kentridge and Denis Hirson entitled "À pas de panthère." More recently in 2022, his work was featured in the group exhibition "Le Songe d'Ulysse" at the Villa Carmignac (Porquerolles Island) and the Royal Academy of Arts (London) dedicated a monographic exhibition to him.

Currently, the Broad Museum (Los Angeles, USA) is hosting a solo exhibition entitled "In Praise of Shadows," and his opera "Waiting for the Sybil" was recently presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

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