SKD: William Kentridge

Radierung mit Ausschnitt einer Weltkarte mit schwarzen Zeichnungen

William Kentridge. Listen to the Echo

William Kentridge is one of the world’s most important contemporary artists. Starting in September 2025 the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the Museum Folkwang in Essen are dedicating an extensive exhibition project to the internationally acclaimed artist William Kentridge to mark his 70th birthday.

Kentridge came to international prominence in the late 1980s for his animated short films dealing with the South African apartheid regime. These films, which are based on large-format charcoal drawings, form the starting point for an extensive and diverse body of works that encompasses drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and tapestry, as well as opera productions and multimedia stage plays. The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden will be presenting Kentridge’s work in several locations at the same time.

At the artist’s request, the Kupferstich-Kabinett, will be holding its first major exhibition of his prints in the Residenzschloss. In experimental, often large-scale, works, Kentridge employs traditional printing techniques for contemporary pictorial inventions. Additional smaller-scale presentations in the Residenzschloss will create links between Kentridge’s themes and works of art in the electoral collections, such as the Triumphal Procession by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna.

The Albertinum will be showing William Kentridge’s large-format works in various media. The conceptual point of reference will be the Procession of Princes (Fürstenzug), completed in 1907. Measuring more than 100 metres in length, this mural in the heart of Dresden’s old city centre depicts a procession of all the rulers of Saxony on thousands of Meissen porcelain tiles. The preliminary drawing of the same dimensions will enter into dialogue with Kentridge’s monumental work More Sweetly Play the Dance from 2015, a multiscreen procession of heroic figures and misfits engaged in something between a parade and a danse macabre.

The Puppentheatersammlung is inviting the Centre for the Less Good Idea from Johannesburg, under the mentorship of William Kentridge, to curate the 2025/2026 annual exhibition at its new location in Dresden’s Kraftwerk Mitte. Founded by Kentridge in 2016, the Centre has quickly established itself as an internationally acclaimed venue for experimental, collaborative, and interdisciplinary art practices involving theatre, dance, music, and performance. In Dresden, artists from the Centre will reactivate the historical puppets in the collection and bring them to life through artistic interventions.