🗓 28 June 2025 – 19 April 2026
📍 Underground Gallery & Surrounding Gardens, YSP
This summer, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) invites visitors to experience the powerful gravitational pull of one of the world’s most important contemporary artists. William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity marks a significant moment in the artist’s career — his first major museum presentation outside South Africa to focus solely on sculpture — and promises to be one of the most compelling exhibitions of 2025.
Sculpture as Expanded Drawing
Spanning nearly two decades of work, from 2007 to 2024, this ambitious exhibition features over 40 sculptural worksby William Kentridge, filling the Underground Gallery and extending outdoors into YSP’s iconic landscape.
Kentridge, known internationally for his politically charged drawings, animations, and performances, has over time transformed sculpture into an extension of his drawing practice. Emerging from puppetry, film sets, and stage props, his sculptures breathe theatrical life into bronze, cardboard, wood, steel, and found materials. These objects don’t just occupy space — they gesture, stride, shout, and invite us into the rhythms and contradictions of memory, movement, and meaning.
Highlights of the Exhibition
🌟 New Works on Parade
Premiering at YSP is the newly commissioned series Paper Procession — six monumental coloured sculptures on display in the open air. These bold, celebratory forms echo Kentridge’s fascination with marching figures and performative rituals, animated through scale and colour.
🎥 Film Meets Form
In the gallery, visitors can view Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020–24) — a witty, deeply personal film project begun during the Covid-19 lockdown — alongside the UK museum debut of More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), a captivating seven-channel video installation that blurs the boundaries between dance, protest, and procession.
🖤 Large-Scale Bronzes in the Garden
Set against the historic Bothy Garden’s 19th-century brick wall, a suite of towering bronze sculptures — each standing over three metres tall — will command the landscape. From a striding figure with a megaphone for a head, to an oversized ampersand, and a stoic cat, these surreal yet deeply human forms highlight Kentridge’s ability to balance absurdity with weighty reflection.
🗂️ Materials of Memory
Across the exhibition, viewers will encounter an eclectic range of materials: bronze, steel, paper, plaster, wood, and cardboard. Kentridge’s materials are chosen not for their preciousness, but for their ability to carry metaphor — to hold the past, resist polish, and reflect the tension between permanence and fragility.
Why It Matters
The Pull of Gravity invites us to consider not only the materiality of sculpture but the invisible forces that act upon us — history, politics, memory, grief, resistance, absurdity, and art itself. Kentridge’s sculptures, whether intimate or monumental, insist on being seen not as static objects, but as living inquiries into how we navigate the world and its complex weight.
🎟 Don’t Miss It
This is not just a rare opportunity to see Kentridge’s sculptural work in depth — it’s a chance to engage with one of the most influential voices in global contemporary art, in a setting uniquely attuned to landscape, scale, and movement.
William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity
🗓 28 June 2025 – 19 April 2026
📍 Yorkshire Sculpture Park – Underground Gallery & Outdoors