Exhibition: William Kentridge

Enter a new, immersive world by the multi-sensory artist and global creative powerhouse William Kentridge.

Over the last decade, our single artist shows have captured the imagination of the public. Always large in scale, ambitious in scope and astonishing in execution, we’ve seen artists including Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley take on our Main Galleries. This autumn, it’s the turn of William Kentridge, South Africa’s most celebrated living artist.

Kentridge’s globally acclaimed practice spans across etching, drawing, collage, film and sculpture to tapestry, theatre, opera, dance and music. The Johannesburg-born artist developed his early work during the apartheid regime of the 1980s, and his electrifying large-scale productions and animations have since been shown across the world.

Transforming the Main Galleries, this will be the biggest exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK. Many pieces have never been seen before, and some have been made specifically for the show. Spanning a 40-year career, you will find rooms of 4-metre wide tapestries, his signature charcoal trees and flowers, and the breath-taking three-screen film, Notes Towards a Model Opera. Watch as typewriters turn into trees, a hunted rhino somersaults with a megaphone, and a coffee plunger drills into the depths of a goldmine.