The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will host the acclaimed exhibition William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows, from June 25 to September 10, 2023. Organized in cooperation with The Broad, Los Angeles, where it opened in November 2022, the exhibition surveys 35 years of the celebrated South African artist’s career, and features more than 80 works touching on every aspect of Kentridge’s wide-ranging investigations in the visual arts, film, and theater.

Born in Johannesburg in 1955, where he continues to live and work today, Kentridge has dedicated much of his career to exploring the social and political conditions of his home country, from the Apartheid era (1948–91), through South Africa’s transition to desegregation and democratic elections (1991–94), and to its present-day realities. Featuring his world-renowned charcoal drawings and animated films, as well as prints, bronzes, tapestries, and theater models, William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows uses the paradoxes of light and shadow to directly engage with the aftermath of colonialism, the recording and memory of historical narratives, and how the artist’s studio can disrupt the certainties of long-held belief systems.

“We are thrilled to be able to exhibit William Kentridge’s expansive work in Houston,” said Gary Tinterow, Director, the Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “His inimitable art remains so compelling and urgent because it demonstrates the universal need to address inequity and social justice everywhere throughout the world, not just in his native South Africa. Lulled by the beauty of his drawing and the immersive

nature of his installations, visitors will be amazed by Kentridge’s ability to provoke revelations about the complexity of human nature.”

We are enormously pleased to present William Kentridge’s expansive, thought-provoking work,” said Gary Tinterow, MFAH Director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair. “His has been an essential voice in bringing forward the struggles of South Africa to address universal issues of history, power, and society.”

“William Kentridge brings a profound humanism and collaborative spirit to every aspect of his work,” added Alison de Lima Greene, the MFAH’s Isabel Brown Wilson curator of modern and contemporary art. “He surveys the world around us with an attentive and critical eye, uncovering stories that are at once viscerally personal and universally relatable.”

Organized thematically and chronologically, the Houston presentation opens with Kentridge’s depictions of Johannesburg and introduces his most famous protagonist, the industrial magnate Soho Eckstein, through drawings and films that range from 1989 to

1. Subsequent galleries include works related to Kentridge’s theater and opera productions, including his restaging of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute, represented by a model theater and preparatory drawings from 2005. Works addressing the toxic legacy of colonialism and propaganda occupy the next gallery, which is then followed by 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès; Day for Night; and Journey to the Moon (2003), an immersive environment made up of complementary projections that reveal how everyday experience, experimentation, and associative play a critical role in Kentridge’s art making. The exhibition concludes with KABOOM!, a video installation from 2018, as well as recent works that reaffirm the creative act as means of political engagement and transformative knowledge.