By Carol Real
Among the season’s exhibitions in New York, A Natural History of the Studio by William Kentridge stands out for its precision of thought and rare visual coherence. Rather than a traditional retrospective, it unfolds as a living essay on the act of creation itself — an anatomy of the artist’s mind, rendered in charcoal, paper, and the restless rhythm of ideas.
Presented at Hauser & Wirth, the show occupies the gallery’s spaces like an expanded notebook, where drawing, film, and sculpture trace the habits of thought that shape Kentridge’s world. Across references to colonial Africa, Soviet politics, Greek myth, and the banal rituals of daily life, he constructs a visual philosophy that is both intimate and analytical.
The videos, in which the artist debates with his alter egos, are disarmingly open. They reveal process as a form of thinking, doubt as structure, humor as survival. The bronze sculptures on the upper floor — half sign, half gesture — distill his language into pure form, while the prints at 18th Street revisit the discipline of mark-making as political stance.
Rather than monumentalizing the studio, Kentridge turns it inside out. What emerges is a portrait of the artist not as genius but as perpetual worker, mapping the fragile distance between thinking and making. In doing so, he offers one of the year’s most lucid meditations on what it means to sustain imagination under pressure — and why art remains, above all, a practice of attention.
Installation view, ‘William Kentridge. A Natural History of the Studio,’ Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street, 1 May – 1 August 2025 © William Kentridge. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio
On view May 1 – August 1, 2025
📍 Hauser & Wirth 22nd Street
542 West 22nd Street, New York
Featuring all original drawings from Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, large-scale sculptures, and the video work Fugitive Words.
📍 Hauser & Wirth 18th Street
443 West 18th Street, New York
A focused survey of Kentridge’s printmaking practice over the last two decades.
More information: www.hauserwirth.com