William Kentridge reveals animal and botanical forms through bronzes caught between drawing, theatre.
William Kentridge presents two major bronzes which draw on the artist’s ever-developing visual language of curvilinear and silhouetted forms. Both sculptures slip seamlessly between rhythmic abstraction and more recognisable figuration. Goat (2021) is an open-ended revision and unravelling of Picasso’s The She-Goat (1950) with reference to the contorted, ancient marble Laocoön. Its abstract base began in landscape drawings of barbed wire for Kentridge’s theatrical production of Wozzeck (2017), before shifting into a four-legged creature through the artist’s play with form, silhouette and recognition. Sapling (2026) explores mortality and human fragility, evoking the idea that a “tree grows inside you” and reflecting on lives cut short before reaching fullness. Presented together on trompe l’oeil packing crates, these bronzes and the signifiers within them generate a feeling that is both animated and provisional, caught between drawing and theatre.
“I was thinking about objects that turn, and in a moment of turning they lose their abstraction and find a moment of coherence – as if the world shatters, and turns, finds a logic, and then passes by.”
William Kentridge
About the Artist
William Kentridge is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre, and opera productions. His method combines drawing, writing, film, performance, music, theatre and collaborative practices to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history, yet maintain a space for contradiction and uncertainty.
Presented by Annandale Galleries
About Installations
Installations presents ambitious contemporary art throughout Carriageworks, and for the first time, extends into the city. The program of 14 projects features sculpture, textiles, painting, photography, kinetic forms, and public interventions, with works that are generous and immediate but also ask us to look more closely at the social, ecological, and cultural systems shaping our world.
Artists use spectacle, material invention and public address to explore some of the defining questions of contemporary life: how histories inhabit place, how images circulate, how materials carry memory, and how audiences gather, move, participate and reflect. Installations is curated by José Da Silva, Director of UNSW Galleries.
