Latest news with #YorkshireSculpturePark
BBC News
22-07-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Solar farm near Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield approved
A solar farm will be built close to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park after councillors approved the will be installed across 55 hectares of countryside, including some around 500m from the outdoor tourist attraction near West Bretton, than 170 people objected to the proposal, with many citing the potential impact on the appearance of the Wakefield Council's planning and highways committee voted in favour of the application, submitted by Boom Power, by a majority of six to one. Under the plans, the solar panels would be split across two is close to a conservation area near the village of Woolley, while the other is off Haigh Lane, which is close to the M1 motorway and the sculpture concerns included the potential loss of wildlife habitats, loss of agricultural land and a flood risk being created, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said. Ian White, of Woolley Parish Council, said the proposals would have a "significant impact" on said: "This is one of the last scenic and undeveloped areas in the Wakefield district."It's home to Yorkshire Sculpture Park , one of Wakefield's outstanding cultural and recreational tourist attractions of national repute."This is the first step in the destruction of one of Wakefield's most attractive areas."But Boom Power said the project would produce enough renewable energy to power 11,700 family homes a Spurway, representing the applicant, said: "Impacts both positive and negative have been taken into consideration."The positives of the scheme have been shown to outweigh the negatives."The way we generate our electricity in this country is changing. The use of fossil fuels is being phased out."The Yorkshire Sculpture Park opened in 1977 at a 500-acre plot surrounding Bretton Hall, which was a teacher training college at the time before closing in the year it was revealed the world-famous Groucho Club - a private members' club famed for hosting A-list celebrities - would move into the vacant property in 2026. It will be its first premises outside London. Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Forbes
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
At YSP William Kentridge Asks What We Can Trust in Image and Memory
William Kentridge in his studio with Laocoön, Johannesburg, 2021 Stella Olivier for William Kentridge William Kentridge works with drawing, sculpture, tapestry, film, theatre, opera, and writing—exploring all manner of material, from paper to clay to bronze. His creations move and migrate between media and criss-cross time lucidly. And his multidisciplinary practice has left a distinct mark on contemporary visual culture, reshaping how we think about image, memory, time. A native of Johannesburg, and the son of prominent anti-apartheid lawyers (his father represented Nelson Mandela), Kentridge's practice is inevitably entangled in the socio-political history of South Africa and the wider world. Yet he rejects the idea of offering fixed truths. Instead, his work constantly questions the grand narratives of history, politics, science, literature, and music—opening up spaces that interrogate the legacies of colonialism and power, and invite multiple ways of seeing. William Kentridge, Cursive, 2020 Thys Dullaart for William Kentridge 'William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity' dips into the artist's visionary world. Staged across the indoor gallery and the lawns of Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the north of England, the exhibition features 40 works made between 2007 and 2024. They join a distinguished lineup of sculptures in the park's landscape, including works by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink, and James Turrell. This is the first museum presentation for Kentridge outside South Africa to focus on his sculptures. He says, 'I never thought of myself as a sculptor, but I had worked a lot with shadows in performance and in drawings and I was interested in the possibility of making something like a shadow—so ephemeral and without any substance—to be solid.' William Kentridge's Paper Procession (Palermo Cash Book) I (2023) is part of a series of hand‑torn paper cutout miniature silhouettes which inspired the new commissions Thys Dullaart for William Kentridge At the heart of the exhibition is 'Paper Procession', a new YSP commission featuring six monumental, brightly colored sculptures that appear to be paper thin but are in fact made from painted aluminium panels fixed to steel armatures. They parade human-like outdoors along a century-old yew hedge and are joined in the main YSP park by four of the artist's largest bronzes. The idea for the new commissions 'derived from anxiety,' he tells me. 'I had to find something for this place and it happened innocently.' Like much of his work, the sculptures evolved intuitively—from flat paper puppets to freestanding forms to these towering outdoor figures. One of William Kentridge's Paper Procession works at Yorkshire Sculpture Park Nargess Banks The central YSP gallery features two major video works shown in rotation. 'More Sweetly Play the Dance' (2015) is a hauntingly moving and strangely beautiful silhouetted procession of figures—a brass band, skeletons, refugees—referencing displacement, disease and endurance. 'Oh To Believe in Another World' (2022) takes an even darker, more politically charged turn. Set to Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No.10 (a work long associated with the composer's fraught relationship with Stalin) the film interrogates the tension between artistic freedom and totalitarian control. In the past, Kentridge has spoken of art's role in giving a sense of agency in the world—for the maker and the viewer. Here music becomes a lens for thinking about the artist as witness, as resister, as someone navigating between public history and private reckoning. William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) at LUMA Foundation, Arles Victor & Simon, Joana Luz for William Kentridge YSP brings in visitors from all walks of life who come for the art, the beautiful walks and scenery, and for a day out. It also attracts large numbers of school children from nearby cities, many of whom may not have been exposed to art, and certainly not contemporary art. I ask Kentridge how it feels to be exhibiting here. 'With these sculptures its not like looking at an old master, where we think there's no possible way I could imagine making this. With my sculptures you can see very clearly how things are constructed, how they're put together. And visitors may think: I too can also be an artist.' William Kentridge, Oh To Believe In Another World (2022), at LUMA Foundation, Arles Vicor & Simon, Joana Luz for William Kentridge 'The Pull of Gravity' is a thoughtful show, with a curatorial approach that highlights Kentridge's constant movement across disciplines. He is also a committed collaborator, and you sense that at YSP—just as you sense the movement of ideas from one exhibition space to the next—often sparked, he says, by a studio member's particular talent or a material's own response to form. Kentridge speaks of provisional coherence as the concept central to his practice: that meaning, form, even understanding are never fixed and certainly never absolute. Coherence, for him, emerges through process, through these layers and fragments that come together for a moment, only to shift again. It's a kind of order that remains open to change, to revision, and is always shaped by its context. William Kentridge, Still from Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, 2022 Kentridge Studio, William Kentridge To my mind, be it in two or three dimensions, Kentridge's work is always collage. This is how he sees the world, and it is fundamental to how he would like us to view the world since collage requires us to understand the world as fragmented. And it is precisely this that makes Kentridge's work so exciting and so right for our black-and-white, left-or-right, painfully polarizing times. 'Things that seem so clear are clear for a moment,' he tells me when I probe him on the concept, 'and then the clarity disappears and you have to find a different kind of clarity.' This is work that adamantly refuses to instruct or be didactic. Instead, it gestures toward hope, brimming with poeticism, beauty and metaphor. William Kentridge, Untitled VI (Nose on Horse, Napoleon), 2007 William Kentridge As an artist in constant engagement with societal concerns, I ask if he has hope in a world that, for many of us, feels increasingly dark and difficult to digest. His face grows serious as he tells me, 'I have both hope and pessimism—both running together. I think to have only one or the other is to blind yourself to part of the world.' It is this holding of contradictions—beauty and brutality, doubt and belief—that makes Kentridge's work resonate so widely. 'I'm interested in moments of clarity,' he says, 'but ones that don't pretend to last.' And the YSL show invites us to sit inside uncertainty, and to think, to feel, and to keep looking. 'William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity' is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from June 28, 2025 to April 19, 2026. For more on art and design, follow my reviews here .
Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
William Kentridge: the Pull of Gravity review — romp with a playful genius
You might think of William Kentridge as a political artist. Born and raised in South Africa, the son of barristers who represented those oppressed by the apartheid system, he is internationally recognised especially for his mesmerising films that use hand-drawn charcoal animation, rubbed out and redrawn, along with live performers, to explore social injustice and the abuse of power. So you would be right, but Yorkshire Sculpture Park's exhibition takes a different tack, focusing on the way that, over the past couple of decades, Kentridge has shifted towards sculpture, beginning with the kinetic props that form part of his installations and theatre or opera productions. Here only one of these, Singer Trio (2019), is functional, but it does sing at you when you approach. Made of sewing machines, it's a nice indication of the absurdity to come. Inspired by Dada and Surrealism, there is something captivating and playful about Kentridge's work, even when it's in service of serious matters. His style is also unmistakable. Here you get a sense of how he has built his unique visual lexicon, moving from drawings to tearing the shapes out of paper, to 3D models, playing with scale — such as the new works made specifically for this exhibition, Paper Procession, which loom brightly in the landscape outside the galleries. With Goat (2021) he realised the bronze coils resembled a four-legged creature and added a goat's head, in homage to Picasso's 1950 She-Goat. With his Glyphs series, which suggest meaning but remain ambiguous, Kentridge takes everyday objects such as hand tools, and turns them into sculpture, very much in the mode of Picasso or Mirò. Meaning and ambiguity, questioning certainty, challenging conventional images of authority, are consistent ideas. Nothing is quite as it seems — Cat Coffee Pot (2019) is a mass of bronze scribbles which, at one angle, resembles a scrawny cat, and at another morphs into a coffee pot. A collection of raggedy horses, all bronze but one appearing to be made out of ladders (it's one of several impressive trompe l'oeil collaborations with a scenic painter) subvert the traditional equestrian portrait, the elevation to the heroic that comes from sticking a man on a horse and a horse on a plinth. As ever, though, the films take a starring role. More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), an unfurling parade of figures processing through an animated landscape in a sort of danse macabre that references the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, runs on a loop across seven huge screens with Oh to Believe in Another World (2022), a lavish animated exploration of Russian history from the 1920s to the death of Stalin, set to Shostakovich's 10th Symphony with dancers and puppets representing key historical figures from despots to poets. • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews I could watch his series Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020-24), revealing his working life through animation and irascible arguments with a duplicate of himself, for hours (and probably will — they're available to stream on Mubi). Here it's surrounded by evocations of the studio. It invites you in, and keeps you there, like everything he does.★★★★☆From June 28 to April 19, 2026, @timesculture to read the latest reviews
IOL News
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- IOL News
William Kentridge presents landmark exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
William Kentridge's Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) landmark exhibition includes a selection of his sculpture from different scales and media, including bronze, steel, paper, cardboard, plaster, wood and found objects. Image: Supplied Staff Reporter CELEBRATED South African artist, William Kentridge's landmark exhibition The Pull of Gravity presented by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) marks the first museum presentation outside South Africa to focus on his sculpture and has been a decade in the making. Bringing together over 40 works made between 2007 and 2024, this significant project has been described as a carefully choreographed and multi-sensory journey into Kentridge's world. The Pull of Gravity presents an extensive body of sculpture across a range of scales and materials, including bronze, steel, aluminium, paper, cardboard, plaster, wood, and found objects. It features the first institutional presentation of Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020-24). Event organisers say this series of short films was embarked upon during the first Covid-19 lockdown and allows audiences an intimate insight into the life of Kentridge's studio, the workings of his mind, and the energy and agency of making. In the central gallery space, two films – More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) and Oh To Believe In Another World (2022) – are shown in rotation in an immersive installation across seven screens. They span over 20 metres and wrap around the viewers, surrounding them with music and movement. YSP Director Clare Lilley said they had a long-held ambition to work with Kentridge. 'For more than a decade we have had conversations about sculpture. It is with a profound sense of joy to now present a substantial and representative body of Kentridge's sculptural work. The artist has created a new series of monumental painted aluminium and steel sculptures which are joined by large bronzes in the stunning Yorkshire landscape. This ambitious exhibition will be a whirlwind of sound and image where the personal and political, the rhapsodic and ordinary, and the seemingly insignificant and socially imperative collide, creating a potent, dynamic world.' Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Sculpture has increasingly become a key part of Kentridge's practice over the past two decades, taking drawing into three dimensions and developing from puppetry, film and stage props. His sculptures delve into how the essence of form is constructed, perceived and understood, testing the boundaries of the medium and its potential to embody ideas and question ways of seeing. 'I am delighted to be having an exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park this year. It is a place with a great history and I am pleased to be in the company of the exceptional artists who have shown there over the years. This exhibition shows the transition of the drawn silhouette or shadow to sculpture and that sculpture is a form of drawing,' said Kentridge. Running throughout the exhibition, from table-top to monumental scale, is a family of bronzes known as Glyph that demonstrates Kentridge's distinctive sculptural language and process. Depicting objects from domestic or studio life – such as a typewriter, coffee pot, and scissors – together with animals, birds and figures, these symbols repeat across his work. Each Glyph begins its life as a two-dimensional ink drawing or paper cut-out. This outline is then traced onto cardboard, carefully removed and built into a three-dimensional form using foamcore and wax to add volume and refine its form, before being cast in bronze. In reference to both ink and shadows, the bronzes all have a black patina. This is a process of bringing an object into existence, adding weight and heft, and one that resonates with the exhibition's title, The Pull of Gravity, say event organisers. Kentridge's sculptures will also be sited outdoors in YSP's historic landscape, including at the top of the sloping Bothy Garden where large-scale bronzes process powerfully against the backdrop of a curving early 19th-century brick wall. The exhibition runs from June 28 to April 2026. Cape Times
