South African artist William Kentridge, who celebrated his 70th birthday this year, is being honored with a comprehensive exhibition spanning five decades of his work at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. The exhibition, titled "Listen to the Echo," showcases the multifaceted work of this universal artist who has become renowned as a magician of transparency, allowing viewers to witness his creative process while maintaining the magical effect of his artworks.
Kentridge is a master of artistic openness who reveals his creative methods, provides clear references to historical contexts, invites audiences into his studio for intimate self-conversations, and guides them to the sources of his inspiration. Yet this transparency paradoxically enhances rather than diminishes the aura of his works. The exhibition is a joint project between the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the State Art Collections Dresden, with Dresden featuring large multi-channel film installations and parts of his printmaking work, including his 2016-founded think tank, the Centre for the Less Good Idea.
The Essen exhibition offers insights into Kentridge's now vast and diverse body of work, which includes drawings, etchings, collages, sculptures, animated films, tapestries, mechanical miniature stages, theater and opera productions, and elaborate film installations. Kentridge is a universal artist deeply rooted in both his South African homeland and European history, resisting all labels except that of unmistakable uniqueness. The Museum Folkwang welcomes visitors with early, lesser-known works from an artist who abandoned his art studies to begin his artistic career in theater during the 1970s.
Kentridge's theatrical background as an actor, director, set designer, and poster designer for Johannesburg's Junction Avenue Theatre Company, which he helped found, fundamentally shaped his artistic approach. Concepts such as transformation, performance, theatricality, and metamorphosis are central to his work, where the boundary between performing and visual arts is not merely fluid but programmatically dissolved. This becomes particularly evident in his eleven-part film series "Drawings for Projection," which tells the story of mine and real estate owner Soho Eckstein and his antagonist Felix Teitlebaum while narrating the history of the mining metropolis Johannesburg.
Johannesburg was founded in 1886 following a major gold discovery and grew even faster than the coal and steel cities of Germany's Ruhr region. Within just ten years, Johannesburg counted more than 100,000 inhabitants, and within half a century, approximately a quarter of all gold ever mined worldwide was extracted there. Four of the eleven films are shown in Essen, created using what Kentridge calls "Stone Age Film-Making" – a modified stop-motion technique where he uses only one drawing per sequence, constantly altering it rather than creating numerous minimally changed drawings.
This unique process involves erasing details or entire passages, adding new elements, filming again, then erasing and redrawing repeatedly. Because charcoal traces cannot be completely removed from paper, a fascinating effect emerges: small remnants of erased areas remain visible, creating what Kentridge calls a visual echo of elapsed time. Time transforms into coal dust, damaged paper fibers, and eraser residue that cling to the paper's surface. This technique perfectly embodies his artistic philosophy of making the invisible visible.
Kentridge has repeatedly transferred European canonical stories and dramas to South Africa, including works by Büchner's Woyzeck, Dr. Faustus, and Jarry's King Ubu, both for the Handspring Puppet Company and his own films. In "Ubu Tells the Truth," also shown in Essen, he animated a series of etchings and combined surreal elements with historical film footage from the brutal suppression of the 1976 Soweto student uprising. The grotesque character Ubu, a scribbled figure capable of transforming into anything including a surveillance camera, exhibits surprising violence, reflecting Kentridge's belief that South Africa's apartheid state, which destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, also possessed distinctly ridiculous characteristics.
As the son of lawyers who represented Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, Kentridge rejected his predetermined legal career path to become an artistic prosecutor of injustice, racism, exploitation, and colonialism. In his "Colonial Landscapes" series, he transforms romantic 19th-century views of African waterfalls by adding geometric elements reminiscent of surveyors' measuring rods – tools essential for European colonial masters' efficient exploitation of the continent. A historical map printed in Essen, from German colonial yearbooks once published by Baedeker and read throughout the German Reich, now lies in a darkened alcove at the Museum Folkwang.
This map faces a mechanical miniature stage called "Black Box / Chambre Noir," created in 2005, which combines work from his staging of Mozart's "Magic Flute" with historical imagery from the Herero uprising. The suppression of this uprising by German protection troops with extreme brutality is considered the first genocide of the twentieth century. The first figure appearing on this delicate miniature stage, borrowed from Louisiana Museum in Denmark, is a megaphone that moves from right to left and back, carrying a small sign reading "Trauerarbeit" (mourning work) like a monstrance.
The Essen exhibition displays around 160 objects from five decades, engaging all senses with a presentation that is neither optimistic nor pessimistic but permeated with violence, injustice, grief, pain, irony, and cheerfulness. In the final exhibition room, modeled after Kentridge's Johannesburg studio, the film series "Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot" is shown. Created during the pandemic, these works show how Kentridge defied isolation by splitting himself into up to four different personas who discussed contradictory positions in his studio.
This latest work again reveals Kentridge as an artist who understands transformation – which knows neither beginning nor end – as the fundamental pattern of his work. Like the title of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro's novel suggests, William Kentridge truly is the painter of our flowing world. The exhibition "William Kentridge: Listen to the Echo" runs at the Museum Folkwang in Essen until January 18, 2026, and at the State Art Collections Dresden until February 15, 2026, with an accompanying catalog available for 38 euros.
