A video still from Notes Towards a Model Opera by William Kentridge
(Picture: Courtesy of the artist)It’s a mark of the relentless productivity of the South African artist William Kentridge that this vast show misses out works that I think of as his masterpieces. Yet it doesn’t suffer for it.
It’s a retrospective of sorts, in that we follow Kentridge from his early, snarling and visceral charcoal and pastel drawings of the apartheid era in the 1980s through his animation of those drawings on film and into the extraordinary diversity of forms of expression of recent years – video installation, performance, opera and music, shadow-play and puppetry, sometimes all at once. But such is the depth of his work and the consistency of his language that he’s able to call on pieces mostly unseen in London, or certainly not seen here for a long time, and the show remains testament to a genuinely unique, coruscating and consistently surprising vision.
