William Kentridge

William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he continues to live and work. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and African Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand in the 1970s. He went on to complete a Diploma in Fine Arts at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, then studied mime and theatre in Paris at L'Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq, training that fed directly into the performative, theatrical quality of his later film and stage work.

Kentridge built his reputation through a distinctive method: drawing in charcoal, photographing and erasing, then redrawing the same sheet to create stop-motion animated films, a technique he used through the 1980s and 1990s in his "Drawings for Projection" series featuring the recurring characters Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlbaum. He won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in South Africa in 1987 and, through the 1990s and 2000s, moved into international prominence via repeated inclusion in Documenta (Kassel) and the Venice Biennale. His practice expanded into large-scale sculpture, tapestry, printmaking, and directing and designing for opera and theatre, including productions such as The Nose, Winterreise, and Sibyl.

His 2010 survey William Kentridge: Five Themes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a 2022 forty-year retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, described by the Royal Academy as his largest UK exhibition, marked further consolidation of his museum standing. He has received honorary doctorates from institutions including the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of London, Yale, and Columbia, and served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 2024.

Kentridge is widely treated by museums and the trade as one of South Africa's foremost contemporary artists, recognized for fusing a personal, hand-drawn visual language with the political and historical weight of apartheid and its aftermath. That standing has been reinforced by sustained institutional attention: repeated inclusion in Documenta and the Venice Biennale from the 1990s onward, the 2010 MoMA survey, and large touring exhibitions such as Thick Time (Whitechapel Gallery, 2016 to 2017) and the 2022 Royal Academy retrospective. His expansion into opera and theatre direction, recognized with a 2023 Laurence Olivier Award for Sibyl, has broadened critical interest in him beyond the visual arts into performance criticism as well. The recurring critical thread is his use of erasure and animation as a way of making memory and historical process visible on the page and screen.

Kentridge's auction market is smaller and more concentrated than his museum profile might suggest. His all-time high is the bronze sculpture Procession (2000), which sold for USD 1,538,500 on 7 March 2013, a result repeated consistently across market databases including Heritage Auctions and MutualArt. The specific auction house and sale location for that result are not confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile. His market spans several price tiers depending on medium, from drawings and prints to major sculptures, though granular results below the sculpture record are not fully documented in the sources reviewed. He is represented across regions by Goodman Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and Lia Rumma.

Kentridge works across several distinct markets, drawings, prints, sculpture, tapestry, and film-related material, and prices vary substantially by medium, so a single auction result should not be read as representative of the whole market. No catalogue raisonne has been identified in available sources, which places extra weight on verification through Kentridge Studio and his representing galleries. His auction history is comparatively shallow relative to his museum presence, and details of his top recorded sale, including the auction house, are not fully documented in public sources, a reminder to confirm provenance and sale specifics directly before relying on any single reported price.