“I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings.”
There's only one month to go until The Pull of Gravity by acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge opens at YSP on Saturday 28 June!
Marking the first museum presentation outside South Africa to focus on his sculpture, the exhibition includes over 40 sculptural works made between 2007 and 2024, including Paper Procession, a new work created for YSP.
Visit the exhibition from 28 June 2025–19 April 2026.
William Kentridge, Il cavaliere di Toledo (2012), Naples
In 2009, Kentridge, in partnership with Gerhard Marx, created a 10m-tall sculpture for his home city of Johannesburg entitled Fire Walker. In 2012 his sculpture,Il cavaliere di Toledo, was unveiled in Naples.[18]Rebus(2013), referring in title to the allusional device using pictures to represent words or parts of words, is a series of bronze sculptures that form two distinct images when turned to a certain angle; when paired in correspondence, for example, a final image – a nude – is created from two original forms – a stamp and a telephone.[19]
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.[1]
Cast stone or reconstructed stone is a refined artificial stone, a form of precast concrete. It is used as a building material to simulate natural-cut masonry in architectural features such as facings and trim; for statuary; and for garden ornaments. It may replace natural building stones including limestone, brownstone, sandstone, bluestone, granite, slate, and travertine. Cast stone can be made from white or grey cements, manufactured or natural sands, crushed stone or natural gravels, and can be coloured with mineral colouring pigments. It is cheaper and more uniform than natural stone, and allows transporting the bulk materials and casting near the place of use, which is cheaper than transporting and carving very large pieces of stone.
The earliest known use of cast stone was in the Cité de Carcassonne, France, in about 1138.[1] It was first used extensively in London in the late 19th century[2] and gained widespread acceptance in America in the 1920s.[3][4]
One of the earliest developments in the industry was Coade stone, a fired ceramic form of stoneware. Another well-known variety was Victoria stone, which is composed of three parts finely crushed Mount Sorrel (Leicestershire) granite to one of Portland cement, carefully mechanically mixed and poured into moulds. After setting the blocks are placed in a solution of silicate of soda to indurate and harden them. Many manufacturers turned out a very non-porous product able to resist corrosive sea air and industrial and residential air pollution.[5]
According to Rupert Gunnis a Dutchman named Van Spangen set up an artificial stone manufactury at Bow in London in 1800 and later went into partnership with a Mr. Powell. The firm was broken up in 1828, and the moulds sold to a sculptor, Felix Austin.[6]
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