Hauser and Wirth, New York, 1 May to 1 August, 2025
The show’s organizing idea is disarmingly simple and, for Kentridge, unusually literal: the studio as a thinking machine. Kentridge has described the studio as “an enlarged head,” a place where the world comes in, gets broken into fragments, and returns as drawing, performance, or text. (Hauser & Wirth) That statement can read like artist talk boilerplate until you are in the installation, where the “head” is not metaphorical but procedural. The show was built around his episodic film “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” and then surrounded the viewer with the working material that makes that film possible: drawings, paper fragments, revisions, and sculptural props that feel as if they have wandered out of rehearsal. (IFPDA)
The exhibition is not a greatest-hits survey. Instead of treating film, drawing, and sculpture as parallel lanes, it shows their cross-contamination. The film’s premise, a self-portrait displaced onto a domestic object, lets Kentridge do what he does best: think in public. The coffee pot is comic, but it is also a constraint, a way to keep autobiography from turning sentimental. That emphasis on apparatus is why the show feels closer to a studio visit than to a polished museum narrative. (The World Of Interiors)
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