William Kentridge presents landmark exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
William Kentridge's Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) landmark exhibition includes a selection of his sculpture from different scales and media, including bronze, steel, paper, cardboard, plaster, wood and found objects.
Image: Supplied
Staff Reporter
CELEBRATED South African artist, William Kentridge's landmark exhibition The Pull of Gravity presented by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) 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 has been described as a carefully choreographed and multi-sensory journey into Kentridge's world.
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.
It features the first institutional presentation of Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020-24).
Event organisers say 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.
YSP Director Clare Lilley said they had a long-held ambition to work with Kentridge.
'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. This ambitious exhibition will be a whirlwind of sound and image where the personal and political, the rhapsodic and ordinary, and the seemingly insignificant and socially imperative collide, creating a potent, dynamic world.'
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Sculpture has increasingly become a key part of Kentridge's practice over the past two decades, taking drawing into three dimensions and developing from puppetry, film and stage props.
His sculptures delve into how the essence of form is constructed, perceived and understood, testing the boundaries of the medium and its potential to embody ideas and question ways of seeing.
'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,' said Kentridge.
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.
This is a process of bringing an object into existence, adding weight and heft, and one that resonates with the exhibition's title, The Pull of Gravity, say event organisers.
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.
The exhibition runs from June 28 to April 2026.
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