RENAISSANCE MAN

From small-scale drawings to ambitious video installations, the art of William Kentridge interrogates failed utopias and elevates doubt and dissent. Azu Nwagbogu, founder and director of the African Artists’ Foundation, speaks to South Africa’s most influential contemporary artist ahead of his major exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts

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William Kentridge has been a global creative powerhouse for the best part of two decades, yet it feels like he’s only just entering his stride. South Africa’s most influential contemporary artist is the subject of a major autumn exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, which will fill its Main Galleries with works spanning Kentridge’s wide-ranging practice, from drawing, etchings, collage, printmaking, film and sculpture to tapestry, theatre, opera, dance and music. Kentridge’s performative, poetic and literary output mark him out as a Renaissance man, but in a distinctive sense that is at once African – he identifies simply as African – but which also bears traces of his Lithuanian Jewish heritage.

Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in apartheid South Africa in 1955. His father, Sydney Kentridge, became a leading defence lawyer for Black South African leaders in the political trials that dominated international news media during the late 1960s through to the late 1970s. He represented Nelson Mandela during his 1958-1961 treason trial, and in 1978, he gained worldwide acclaim for representing the family of the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. Of his performance, Lord Alexander of Weedon wrote: ‘Through remorseless and deadly cross-examination, sometimes with brilliant irony, Kentridge established that the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement had been killed by police brutality. The verdict of accidental death was seen as risible.’