South African artist William Kentridge is one of the most vital and important voices in our contemporary global culture. Born to a family of lawyers who rallied against the Apartheid regime, his awareness of the troubled social and political situation of his country was formed young; it naturally fed his early artistic engagements, and, in many ways, continues to do so. In part, his background also explains his commitment to figurative art. Starting an art practice in Johannesburg, far from the major artistic centres, saw him connecting to exemplars outside of the main trends of his time, and employing representational forms to respond to the specifics of a complex environment.

Another important factor in Kentridge’s artistic development was his involvement with theatre whilst a student in South Africa and then subsequently at the Ecolé Jacques Lecoq, Paris (where mime was also a major component of his studies). Generated and informed by these experiences, there is a strong performative and theatrical thread that weaves through all of his work; each work emerges from the human body as an entity that might resist political forces and whose physical expression is a kind of freedom.

Since he began making art, Kentridge’s dynamic output has taken many forms, as he has incorporated into his visual arts practice theatre, performance, dance, opera, animation, drawing and more. Each is fed by the other, and what has resulted is a body of work that is as unique as it is exceptional in the field of contemporary art and that has seen him, on one hand, honoured with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and having his version of The Nose (by Shostakovich) presented at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Given the way his practice moves between artistic borders, The Shadow Quartet, whilst a sculpture, also speaks to and comes out of other forms. In particular, these four figures - that weigh about 400 kilograms each and stand three meters high - are extensions of the ideas guiding the small bronzes that made up Kentridge's film Shadow Procession of 2001. Like their moving image precursors, these large sculptures morph as the viewer walks around them, harking back to the characters in Kentridge's films that also keep changing shape and form. They take on a theatrical scale that in some way brings his shadow puppetry work into a three-dimensional realization. The challenge in the works was to maintain the fresh and fluid mark making and gestures that exist for him when he is tearing paper or working with charcoal in a scale that would ultimately be double his height.

In these ways, they sum up the core concerns of his output thus far. As he has said: “My work is about the provisionality of the moment… I’ve become very suspicious of certainty. First comes understanding the value of doubt. For me, that’s how we go through the world.”[1] The way these figures turn into other shapes and structures and beings references that our view on the world is always context specific and subject to interpretation and re-interpretation.


These four figures - that weigh about 400 kilograms each and stand three meters high - are extensions of the ideas guiding the small bronzes that made up Kentridge's Shadow Procession of 2001. Like their precursors, these large sculptures morph as the viewer walks around them, harking back to the characters in Kentridge's films that also keep changing shape and form. They take on a theatrical scale that in some way brings his shadow puppetry work into a three-dimensional realization. The challenge in the works was to maintain the fresh and fluid mark making and gestures that exist for him when he is tearing paper or working with charcoal in a scale that would ultimately be double his height.