This, the first major monograph on the widely acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge, brings together nearly two hundred of his works made between 1989 and 2012. Exploring Kentridge's diverse expressions across a wide range of media, from film and video to sculpture, design, drawing, and printmaking, the book is lavishly illustrated with more than 2,000 images. It reveals Kentridge's love of contradiction and uncertainty, his work moving variously between the personal and political, the static and temporal, the humorous and profound, the real and metaphorical, and between acts of making and of disassembling or erasure.
Kentridge's dynamic way of working in his Johannesburg studio is revealed, a creative process that can be described as an act of performance during which he searches for forms of expression for his powerful and poetic ideas. His own lively commentaries accompany his works, offering indispensable insights into his working methods and creative thinking. Essays by Lilian Tone and Kate McCrickard put his practice into wider context, investigating the conceptual and visual tendencies in Kentridge's work, and the relationship between his art and his native South Africa.