William

Kentridge

isn’t

planning

on

stopping

anytime

soon

William Kentridge sits down with Annabel Downes to discuss his return to Goodman Gallery, London, for ‘A Nicely Built City’, and why cats make good animations

There was a moment when it looked as though William Kentridge might be heading to Hollywood. It was the early 1980s, and the young artist, then in his early 30s, had spent several months developing a feature set on the fringes of his hometown of Johannesburg, where the comfortable life of a wealthy family played out alongside a group living in the wastelands beyond their home. He began sending treatments around. There was a bit of excitement. A few phone calls. But somewhere along the way, Kentridge began to wonder: why spend all that energy getting other people excited about a film you want to make when you could just go ahead and start making one yourself?

The feature was abandoned. In its place came an eight-minute, 16mm animated film titled Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris. Goodman Gallery showed it in 1992, in what was Kentridge’s first exhibition with the gallery. Set in Johannesburg during the crumbling final years of apartheid, the film follows Soho Eckstein, a rapacious property magnate, and Felix Teitelbaum, an artist and dreamer. It became the first of ‘Drawings for Projection’ (1989-ongoing), a series of stop-motion films tracing Johannesburg, and South Africa more broadly, through the end of apartheid, the 1994 elections and the period of national self-examination that followed.

At 71, Kentridge is today recognised as one of South Africa’s most influential artists. That film was the beginning of a remarkable four decade career that has expanded into printmaking, sculpture, theatre and opera. His performances have reached the stages of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Sydney Opera House and, most recently, Glyndebourne. His first survey exhibition opened at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1998, followed by major retrospectives at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town in 2019 and at the Royal Academy in London in 2022. He was appointed an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy in 2015 and received an Olivier Award for Sibyl in 2023. Now, more than 30 years after his first Goodman show, Kentridge returns to Goodman’s London outpost for the global premiere of his latest, A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction), 2026.