A Natural History of the Studio

This is the third library text written by New York based About Art Guest Contributor Gracie Newman

A Natural History of the Studio by William Kentridge, forthcoming from Grove Press on April 28, is an insightful, rich reflection on a legendary artist’s career. Born in South Africa, Kentridge’s celebrated multi-disciplinary work includes charcoal drawings, prints, animated films, and opera. The book is assembled from a series of lectures Kentridge recently delivered at Oxford, offering insights on not only his own artistic practice but also the act of human creation itself. As he writes, “we invite the world in and then transform it with all the techniques and grammar of the studio.”

Like Kentridge’s art, his writing is at once playful and learned. ANatural History of the Studio offers lively, profound considerations of the themes that permeate his work, intertwining political injustice, literary and art history, and personal memory. For him, drawing is an immediate, propulsive mechanism to render the momentum of thought. Kentridgewrites of the human experience, and his in particular, as consisting of the same qualities as a drawing: layers, depth,absence, fragmentation, illumination, perspective…in short, a thing subject to both disintegration and restoration.