William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio

May 1, 2025

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)

A “natural history” is, by definition, an accounting of species, habits, and evolutions. Here, the “species” are Kentridge’s recurring visual actors: silhouetted figures, stray diagrams, bits of text, and those stubborn, reappearing objects (the coffee pot, the chair, the megaphone, the bureaucratic desk). You see him working by accretion and erasure, testing an image, undoing it, dragging its ghost into the next frame. (Hauser & Wirth)

The sculptures functioned as interruptions. Kentridge’s sculptural language is not about finish or virtuoso fabrication; his drawn world has a physical weight. In installation, the objects play like stage props with ideas attached: they make the room feel inhabited by process. This is also where the show’s humor is at its best, because Kentridge’s comedy is rarely punchline comedy. It is the comedy of misfit parts trying to assemble into meaning and failing in interesting ways. (The World Of Interiors)

Now, the skeptical note. Kentridge is so fluent at staging “thinking” that the format can start to feel like a signature product: the messy desk elevated to an aesthetic. If you have seen a few Kentridge installations, the pleasures are familiar, and the danger is that the work’s political and historical bite can become, in the gallery setting, a kind of atmospheric credibility. The stronger reviews of this show argued, implicitly, that the work stays ahead of that trap because the marks remain genuinely unresolved, and because Kentridge keeps the studio’s uncertainties in view rather than smoothing them into “content.”

Tags: Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting

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Drawing, Modern Art, Sculpture

Ruth Asawa: The Weightless Line

September 13, 2017

David Zwirner, New York, Sept 13 to October 21, 2017.

I’ve spent the afternoon in a forest made of wire.

Asawa’s signature hanging sculptures, those translucent, biomorphic lobes that seem to defy gravity. They don’t feel like “sculpture” in the traditional sense; they feel like drawings that decided to stand up.

The Geometry of a Shadow

The most mesmerizing thing isn’t just the wire itself, but the shadows they cast on the white gallery walls. Because the works are looped and nested, the shadows become secondary artworks. They look like cellular structures or ghosts of the pieces themselves.

Asawa once said she wanted to “enclose space without blocking it out,” and seeing these in person, you realize she achieved exactly that. They are there, but they are also empty.

Beyond the Wire

While the “baskets” get all the glory, the smaller room with her works on paper is also a revelation. I spent a long time looking at a piece made entirely from a “BMC” laundry stamp from her days at Black Mountain College. It’s a simple, repetitive mark that creates this undulating, textile-like pattern. You can see the DNA of her sculptures right there on the page, the obsession with the “economy of line” she learned from Josef Albers.

Notebook Thoughts:

The Vibe: Surprisingly intimate for such a high-profile gallery. It felt like a “mini-museum” show.
Key Takeaway: You don’t need to be loud to be powerful. These wires are thin, but they hold the entire room.

2026 Retrospective Note:

It’s wild to look back at this 2017 entry and remember how “new” this felt to the New York establishment. In 2017, this was David Zwirner’s first show after taking over her estate. It was a formal “re-introduction” of Asawa to the canon.

Fast forward to today, 2026, and Asawa is no longer an “overlooked” artist; she’s a cornerstone of 20th-century modernism. We’ve seen the massive MoMA retrospective now, and at SFMoMA and her prices have skyrocketed, but I still think back to this specific afternoon at Zwirner. It was the moment the art world finally stopped calling her a “craftsperson” and started calling her a master.