William Kentridge: Five Themes

William Kentridge: Five Themes celebrates the work of one of the world's leading contemporary artists.

After premiering at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and travelling to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, then on to Paris, Vienna, Jerusalem and Moscow, the exhibition comes to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image for an exclusive Australian season.

Born in 1955 in South Africa, William Kentridge rose to prominence as an artist and animator, winning international acclaim for his stop motion films of layered charcoal drawings. Melancholic and magical, his work is strongly tied to the social and political environment of his home country in the pre- and post-Apartheid era. Tackling issues of colonial oppression, reconciliation, the transient nature of individual and shared memory, Kentridge deftly combines the political with the poetic in work that spans various artforms, from visual art to theatre to the world of the moving image. Inspired by European literature, classical music, opera, plays and early cinema, Kentridge uses archetypal characters to build whimsical, poignant and playful narratives in which good and evil are both complementary and inseparable forces.

William Kentridge: Five Themes features over 60 works ranging from animations, drawings and prints to theatre models, sculptures and books. An unmissable survey of a phenomenal artistic talent, the exhibition explores five key themes of Kentridge's career, including his direction of The Magic Flute for the renowned Belgian opera house, La Monnaie, and the animated films he developed for a 2010 production of The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

William Kentridge
Five Themes