Viewing William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s blockbuster has recently opened in time for summer: a surprising showcase by 70-year-old South African artist William Kentridge best known for his playful, conceptual charcoal drawings and hand-drawn animated films. Less celebrated are Kentridge’s sculptures, and ‘The Pull of Gravity’ is the first museum presentation dedicated to his experiments with the medium outside of South Africa.

It reveals a remarkable and long engagement with sculpture, beginning with works from 2007, and charting his evolution as a sculptor through forty works made up to last year. Sculpture has become increasingly important to Kentridge over the last twenty years, as he has evolved his visual language into three dimensions, finding ways to make the figures, forms and characters of his drawings and films in object form, using steel, paper, cardboard, bronze, plaster, wood and found objects.

Fans of Kentridge will delight in this unique opportunity to see another side of Kentridge’s dynamic practice, with new commissions and never-seen-before works embedded in the Yorkshire landscape, including three enormous bronzes representing a striding figure with megaphone head, an ampersand, and a cat – all unmistakable Kentridge icons but at a larger-than-life size. There are also films of course: Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020-24), a series of films whose production began during the first Covid-19 lockdown, as well as the UK museum debut of the 7-channel film, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015).