The Pull of Gravity marks the first museum presentation outside South Africa to focus on his sculpture and has been a decade in the making. Bringing together over 40 works made between 2007 and 2024, this significant project is a carefully choreographed and multi-sensory journey into Kentridge’s world.
Paper Procession, displayed outdoors, is a commission created for YSP of six monumental, colourful sculptures that parade in front of a century-old yew hedge. Joining this new work are four of the artist’s largest bronzes to date, displayed against far reaching views over the Yorkshire landscape. William Kentridge in his studio working on the preparatory plaster version of the monumental bronze Laocoön, Johannesburg, 2021.
The Pull of Gravity presents an extensive body of sculpture across a range of scales and materials, including bronze, steel, aluminium, paper, cardboard, plaster, wood, and found objects. In addition, the exhibition features the first institutional presentation of Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020-24). This series of short films was embarked upon during the first Covid-19 lockdown and allows audiences an intimate insight into the life of Kentridge’s studio, the workings of his mind, and the energy and agency of making. In the central gallery space, two films – More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) and Oh To Believe In Another World (2022) – are shown in rotation in an immersive installation across seven screens.
They span over 20 metres and wrap around the viewers, surrounding them with music and movement. Kentridge is known for working across media, including drawing, sculpture, tapestry, animated films, theatre, and opera productions. He has lived in Johannesburg throughout his life and his practice is indelibly connected to the socio-political history of South Africa.
Clare Lilley, YSP Director, said: “Yorkshire Sculpture Park has had a long-held ambition to work with William Kentridge and for more than a decade we have had conversations about sculpture.
“It is with a profound sense of joy to now present a substantial and representative body of Kentridge’s sculptural work. The artist has created a new series of monumental painted aluminium and steel sculptures which are joined by large bronzes in the stunning Yorkshire landscape.
Over the last two decades, sculpture has increasingly become a key part of Kentridge’s practice, taking drawing into three dimensions and developing from puppetry, film and stage props. The inextricable relationship between drawing and sculpture in his work is at the heart of The Pull of Gravity.
Running throughout the exhibition, from table-top to monumental scale, is a family of bronzes known as Glyph that demonstrates Kentridge’s distinctive sculptural language and process. Depicting objects from domestic or studio life – such as a typewriter, coffee pot, and scissors – together with animals, birds and figures, these symbols repeat across his work. Each Glyph begins its life as a two-dimensional ink drawing or paper cut-out. This outline is then traced onto cardboard, carefully removed and built into a three-dimensional form using foamcore and wax to add volume and refine its form, before being cast in bronze. In reference to both ink and shadows, the bronzes all have a black patina.
Kentridge’s sculptures will also be sited outdoors in YSP’s historic landscape, including at the top of the sloping Bothy Garden where large-scale bronzes process powerfully against the backdrop of a curving early 19th-century brick wall. Over three and a half metres in height, these Glyph works include a striding figure with megaphone head, an ampersand, and a stretching cat.
The six towering and dynamic forms of the significant new commission Paper Procession (2024) stand up to five metres high and their bold tones of red, yellow and orange sing against the dark yew hedge beyond. They were initially created using hand-torn pieces of paper from a cash book and assembled to evoke semi-abstract figures in movement; they retain the form of the original 30cm high versions displayed inside the gallery.
Kentridge said: “I am delighted to be having an exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park this year. It is a place with a great history and I am pleased to be in the company of the exceptional artists who have shown there over the years. This exhibition shows the transition of the drawn silhouette or shadow to sculpture and that sculpture is a form of drawing.”
Visitors will also be able to engage with a programme of activities at YSP, drawing on themes in Kentridge’s work.
Find out more at www.ysp.org.uk