The power of transformation: an immersive, thrillingly layered, journey into William Kentridge’s sculpture – The Art Newspaper

Midway through William Kentridge’s film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot (2023), in which the South African artist plays several versions of himself at work in the studio, Kentridge Two sits astride a sculpted horse standing to attention on a drawing table. Its limbs and neck are made of old-school wooden tripod legs and its body of a cardboard roll. Torn pieces of black paper glued on to the wall behind the sculpture sketch out its head and tail in a bit of trompe-l’oeil bulk: were the camera to shift, the horse would lose its head as the illusion dissolved.

“What are you doing up there?” asks Kentridge One, who is standing on a stepstool, his hands in his pockets, a hint of disdain in the slant of his shoulders. “I’m admiring the view,” says Kentridge Two. “Trying to avoid the embarrassment of scale.”

This horse, replete with its saddle and cutouts — not to mention the wider studio effervescence that lends that Coffee-Pot series such power — are now on show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in a multi-decade survey of Kentridge’s sculptural practice. Titled The Pull of Gravity, this is the first such show to focus on his 3D work outside South Africa.

Taking over the underground gallery and the grounds outside it, the exhibition brings together two large-scale film works, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) and Oh To Believe In Another World (2022), playing sequentially across a seven-screen installation, that Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot series, and about three dozen sculptural works, including four of his largest bronzes to date. Kentridge’s long-term collaborator and set designer Sabine Theunissen’s exhibition design uses felt surfaces, plywood plinths and black heavy-duty runners on the floor to create an immersive journey into Kentridge’s world.

In her opening speech, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s director, Clare Lilley, described bringing the show to fruition as an 11-year dream, if only because, for the longest time, Kentridge himself wasn’t sure “sculptor” was a moniker he could claim. The first time a curator in South Africa suggested he might be one, he had to show Kentridge a list of 120 sculptures he had drawn up to prove his point: the artist simply had not realised how much he had made.

Since the late 1990s, Kentridge has transposed drawing into other media (animation, puppetry, theatre, opera). This has often involved making objects too. To his mind, these props made for other uses are “applied sculpture” in the way that coders and statisticians apply maths to real-world problems. At the core of his practice is a constant cleaving to the notion of transformation: pretty much anything can become something else if you have got eyes that imagine.

The exhibition duly starts with kinetic and mechanised pieces used in live performance: megaphones and an upturned bicycle wheel on legs with casters; flapping timber arms set in motion via cogs and chains; the 2019 piece “Singer Trio” which features three Singer sewing machines equipped with speaker cones that emit recorded song.

A second room, which Kentridge describes as “the most sculptural”, is organised around four sets of what he terms “Glyphs”: pieces that start as tiny torn-paper silhouettes (depicting things like a bit of barbed wire, a toy rattle, an ampersand, a marching figure) that are then given bodily shape as tiny bronzes. When exhibited as sets, they immediately reveal how they function as symbols or words, their order as infinitely variable as letters composing sentences. These are then made incrementally bigger, the artist testing out the limits of where a thing might go.

Outside, installed at the top of the sloping hill into which the gallery is sunk are monumental versions: Ampersand (2019), black and bulbous, stands 3.3 metres tall and almost as wide, surveying the rolling green of the park. It is a thrill to stand alongside it, as the indelible soundtracks — booming, strident, mournful, festive — of the film installations filter up from the third room down below: Shostakovich’s Symphony No 10; the South African composer Johannes Serekeho’s brass-band and choral medley.

Most exciting are the six even bigger pieces, Paper Procession I to VI (2024) of which, from this elevated vantage point, you see just their coloured heads peeking out over the flat, grassy roof of the gallery. They are installed along the towering hedge that borders the gallery’s lawn, the tallest 5.2 metres tall, the shortest, 4 metres: so many figures in various freeze-framed movements. One, bright yellow, holds its arms over its head, another in red cradles something round to its chest, its right leg stretched back in a gentle arabesque.

Each Paper Procession figure is a vastly bigger version of a diminutive assemblage of paper, tape and sticks that you can see in the gallery. Being able to witness these stages of Kentridge’s declination process is of course instructive — you really can see how he works. But those giant outdoor pieces are remarkable for their simplicity, for their distilled sculptural presence.

By contrast, the final room of the show is all about the making. The nine films of Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot are screened in sequence on a monitor installed on an easel, with what feels like everything used to make them (drawings, lists, quotes, pens, rulers, rolls of tape, the camera, the chair, the lamp) displayed in a theatrical mise en scène all around. A whole bunch are arranged on a crate, the label of which specifies that this was shipped from Kentridge’s South African studio to Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

“After 50 years in the studio,” says Kentridge, “there’s a huge amount of work altogether.” He has used the word “muchness” to describe what he was trying to capture with the 2015 procession of More Sweetly Play the Dance — a quite addictively joyful danse macabre. And that, ultimately, is what this show celebrates: the boundless potential of a mind and hands never shying away from the hubris and complexity of the world — nor its beauty — and refusing not to make something of it.

William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 28 June 2025 – 19 April 2026