William Kentridge has spent more than four decades reshaping how we see art’s relationship to politics, history and memory. Born in Johannesburg in 1955, he is acclaimed for an expansive practice that bridges drawing, animation, performance and opera. His work is at once playful and profound, lyrical and urgent, always alive to the contradictions of the human condition. Sculpture has increasingly become central to this language, and The Pull of Gravity at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) offers the most substantial exploration of this facet of his career outside South Africa.
Spanning nearly two decades of practice, the exhibition assembles over 40 works in bronze, steel, paper and plaster. Outdoors, the newly commissioned Paper Procession unfolds across the landscape – six vivid figures marching in dialogue with YSP’s ancient yew hedge. Monumental bronzes – some of Kentridge’s largest to date – stride across the rolling hills, their silhouettes striking against open skies. Indoors, glyph-like bronzes translate the everyday – coffee pots, typewriters, scissors – into solid, enduring forms.
Film and movement run through the show. Two large-scale projections – More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) and Oh To Believe in Another World (2022) – wrap viewers in processions of shadow and sound, evoking migration, resistance and the power of collective expression. Elsewhere kinetic sculptures hum with dark humour, echoing early avant-garde experiments while remaining resolutely contemporary.
That this landmark project unfolds at YSP is significant. The Park has become the UK’s foremost destination for contemporary sculpture, staging ambitious exhibitions that rival those of any capital city. Here Kentridge’s works breathe with the Yorkshire landscape, their forms shifting with the light, their narratives carried on the wind. The Pull of Gravity is a rare chance to encounter an artist of global significance on this scale. It is essential viewing – an exhibition that insists on being experienced in person.
William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 19 April 2026: ysp.org.uk
Words: Anna Müller
Image Credits:
1. William Kentridge. Paper Procession I, 2024 © William Kentridge. Courtesy the artist Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser Wirth. Photo: Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
2. William Kentridge, William Kentridge at Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2024. Courtesy the artist Goodman Gallery, Galleria, Lia, Rumma, and Hauser Wirth. Photo: Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
3. William Kentridge. Paper Procession III, 2024 © William Kentridge. Courtesy the artist Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser Wirth. Photo: Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
4. William Kentridge, Stroke, 2024. © William Kentridge. Courtesy the artist Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser Wirth. Photo: Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
5. William Kentridge. Paper Procession IV, 2024 © William Kentridge. Courtesy the artist Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser Wirth. Photo: Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
6. William Kentridge. Paper Procession II, 2024 © William Kentridge. Courtesy the artist Goodman Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma and Hauser Wirth. Photo: Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
