William Kentridge retrospective at MUDAM Luxembourg covers 40-year career

The MUDAM Luxembourg is hosting 'More Sweetly Play the Dance', a major retrospective of William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg) running until August 30, 2021. The exhibition spans all media employed by the South African artist over four decades: drawing, animated film, sculpture, performance, sound works, and theater. Kentridge is best known for his charcoal animation films created through a distinctive process of erasure and recovery. The show is produced by Mudam Luxembourg in collaboration with the Philharmonie Luxembourg and the Grand Théâtre of the city. At the entrance stands a large black tree silhouette with four enormous megaphones at the corners of the room, evoking resistance against Apartheid through reworkings by a group of South African composers. Kentridge's work is deeply influenced by South Africa's history under Apartheid, blending current events with poetic, incisive, and sometimes naive formal traits. His style is recognizable from charcoal drawings to theatrical works. In Rome, his 550-meter mural 'Triumphs and Laments' along the Tiber between Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini, created in 2016, was later vandalized. In September 2019, he presented 'Waiting for the Sibyl' at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma alongside Calder's 'Work in Progress'. Kentridge's practice fuses present time and history in continuous metamorphosis.