With A Natural History of the Studio, his first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York, renowned South African artist William Kentridge will present his acclaimed episodic film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot with more than seventy works on paper integral to its creation and an array of sculptures at 542 West 22nd Street.
This immersive exhibition is the first ever to present all the drawings from this filmic masterpiece, hailed by critics as a moving, witty and ultimately wondrous synthesis of the personal and the political, the individual and the universal. Spanning two floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street building, ‘A Natural History of the Studio’ also extends to the gallery’s 18th Street location with a concise survey of Kentridge’s printmaking practice.
To mark this occasion, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release a new artist’s book that condenses the essence of Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot through written dialogue and still images.
Conceived by the artist’s longtime collaborator Sabine Theunissen, the installation design for the first floor of A Natural History of the Studio at 22nd Street will include nearly two dozen charcoal drawings used in the animation of Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot and evoke the feeling of being in Kentridge’s working environment with him, a place where the walls hum with inspiration and every surface tells a story.
Shot in his Johannesburg studio at the outset of the global COVID-19 pandemic and completed in 2024, the series includes nine thirty-minute episodes that bring viewers inside the artist’s mind. Through a blend of Kentridge’s signature stop-motion technique, live action performance and philosophical dialogue, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot delves into subjects like Greek mythology, the history of mining in Johannesburg, colonialism in Africa and Soviet absurdities. And here, as in his wider body of work, the seemingly mundane and familiar household coffee pot becomes a stand-in for the artist, an avatar of the art-making process in which a steady flow of ideas is akin to the bubbling of coffee brewing. In several episodes of the series, Kentridge is joined by collaborators and assistants; in others he is seen debating and squabbling with a series of doppelgängers in a playful externalization of his internal creative struggles. Thus, Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot serves as both a celebration of creativity and a snapshot of Kentridge’s pandemic experience.
The second floor of the exhibition will explore the relationship between drawing and sculpture in Kentridge’s oeuvre. The works feel like moving sketches—ephemeral yet powerful––and extend Kentridge’s exploration of history, memory and transformation using humble materials to challenge grand narratives. The presentation will also include Kentridge’s bronze ‘glyphs’ –– sculptures of both everyday and arcane objects, words and icons that function together as a sort of visual glossary that can be arranged and re-arranged to construct different sculptural ‘sentences.’
A Natural History of the Studio extends to Hauser & Wirth’s nearby 18th Street location with a selection of thirty prints made by Kentridge over the last two decades. The artist first began printmaking while a student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the medium has been integral to his practice ever since. Kentridge has experimented with a broad range of techniques in this realm, from etching to lithography, aquatint, drypoint, photogravure and woodcut, observing that, “Printmaking…became a medium in which I could think, not merely a medium to make a picture… it has not been an adjunct to my other activities, but in many ways, it has been a central thread that has gone through the work I have done in the studio over the last 40 years.”
Many of the works on view at 18th Street revisit familiar personal iconography or directly reference other milestone projects, including the films on view at 22nd Street. The image of a typewriter, for example, dominates four print variations on view and is used as a metaphor for communication, historical record-keeping, and bureaucratic authority.
