William Kentridge is a great magician of drawing. He creates his own world of moving figures on paper and animates them in films and on stage. We encounter them again in printmaking, sculpture and tapestries. To mark his 70th birthday, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the Museum Folkwang in Essen are celebrating this global star from Johannesburg with a cross-collection exhibition festival from September 2025.
The starting point of Kentridge's work is the South African apartheid regime and its overcoming. At issue are the universal questions of oppression and marginalisation, of rebellion and self-empowerment, in the tension between triumphs and lamentations. Dresden celebrates Kentridge in several places simultaneously.
In the Residenzschloss, the Cabinet of Prints the particular desire to show his rich printmaking. This medium expresses Kentridge's very own interest in creative collaboration with particular intensity. Whether huge or small-format, radically experimental in technique, the woodcuts and etchings deal with social and individual processes of change. With an eye on the ambivalence of triumphs and lamentations in the past and present, further works are scattered throughout the Residenzschloss, revealing connections to Dresden and its art treasures. https://albertinum.skd.museum/" href="https://albertinum.skd.museum/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); colour: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; font-family: "Baton Turbo Bold", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 15px; outline-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) !important;" class="skd-link-caret">Albertinum is where Kentridge's monumental magnum opus More Sweetly Play the Dance, a cinematically moving procession of heroes and outsiders between parade and dance of death, meets the Dresden tourist attraction of the Fürstenzug. On thousands of Meissen porcelain tiles, it depicts a procession of all Saxon rulers over a length of 100 metres. The preparatory drawing in the same format will be restored for the exhibition and exhibited for the first time. Caspar David Friedrich's Great Enclosure also inspires Kentridge to engage in dialogue.
In the Puppet Theatre Collection at Dresden's Kraftwerk Mitte, the Centre for the Less Good Idea founded by Kentridge from Johannesburg will be in residence for a whole year, bringing the collection's historical puppets back to life with experimental and interdisciplinary works.