The South African artist William Kentridge’s captivating art is rooted in his experience as a witness to apartheid. His expressionist drawings have been described as “lyrical allegories” for the grim realities of colonialism and totalitarianism. His now-signature technique of drawing, filming, and erasing in an astonishing loop stretches his pensive charcoal sketches into another dimension, a dimension of time lapsing. Through this process, which he self-deprecatingly calls “stone-age animation,” he bridges politics and poetry. As he notes, “I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and uncertain endings. An art—and a politics—in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.”

His studies in politics and background in theater are apparent across his oeuvre, which also includes prints, collage, sculpture, and the performing arts. A 2010 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art presented the breadth of his output and coincided with his triumphant direction and set design for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Shostakovich’s The Nose (2010), which brilliantly married narrative, music, movement, and mise-en-scène. His artworks are like palimpsests, records of ideas evolving, actions unfolding—a way of engaging the complexities of the world, with a pulse.

A Resident at the Academy in 2011, Kentridge received AAR’s highest honor, the Centennial Medal, in 2012. He returns to Rome in April, and his time at the Academy is made possible by the Deenie Yudell Fund in Visual Arts.