William Kentridge at Hauser & Wirth

The restless imagination of William Kentridge arrives in Chelsea this spring as Hauser & Wirth unveils “A Natural History of the Studio,” an immersive, two‑venue survey that folds drawing, film, sculpture, and print into a single, humming organism, from May 1 through August 1, 2025. Anchored by the complete suite of charcoal drawings that animate his nine‑part film cycle “Self‑Portrait as a Coffee Pot”—screening continuously at 542 West 22nd Street—the exhibition is the South African polymath’s most intimate New York outing in years, a privileged walk through the corridors of a studio where history, myth, and autobiography jostle for space.

William Kentridge: Inside the Coffee Pot

Across two floors on 22nd Street, visitors step into a facsimile of William Kentridge’s Johannesburg atelier. The first-floor clusters more than seventy drawings around projections of Self‑Portrait as a Coffee Pot, created during the pandemic and completed in 2024. Here, a humble household vessel morphs into an avatar for the artist, bubbling with ideas that ricochet from Greek myth to colonial cartography and back again.

Kentridge spars with filmed doubles, chats with collaborators, and drags stop‑motion silhouettes across the screen, revealing the political motor inside his playful syntax. Upstairs, bronze “glyphs” and hand‑painted aluminum figures march out of ledgers rescued from a 19th‑century Sicilian church, while the one‑channel film Fugitive Words turns notebook doodles into an operatic dance set to Beethoven. In every medium, Kentridge’s hallmark charcoal smudges become the fog through which memory and forgetfulness negotiate a fragile truce.

William Kentridge: A World in Prints

A brisk walk to 443 West 18th Street extends the exhibition with three decades of printmaking that foreground the medium’s role as Kentridge’s laboratory of thought. Etchings of typewriters, lithographic portraits fractured by Soviet disillusion, and photogravure self‑portraits layered with text all testify to an artist who treats paper as both archive and battlefield.

The editioned works echo motifs seen in the films—mineshafts, megaphones, metronomes—mapping how ideas migrate from copper plate to charcoal animation and back again. By housing the prints separately, Hauser & Wirth lets audiences trace the pulse of an oeuvre that has always asked images to bear contradictory truths: the brutality of apartheid and the resilience of imagination, the bureaucrat’s ledger, and the poet’s scrap. In this double exhibition, William Kentridge appears less as a draughtsman of singular objects than as a cartographer of thought, forever redrawing the boundaries between art and the world it confronts.