William Kentridge

‘I Look In The Mirror, I Know What I Need’ (2024) is a powerful new lithograph by William Kentridge, created with Idem in Paris. The print relates to the artist’s video series and exhibition, ‘Self-Portrait As A Coffee-Pot,’ on view in Venice until 24 November. The nine-episode series is also available to stream exclusively worldwide on MUBI.

Over the past four decades, Kentridge has had a keen attention to printmaking as a part of his wider artistic practice. Since the early to mid-1970s, Kentridge has made thousands of prints and holds a deep understanding of the different processes, working in intaglio, etching, lithography, woodcut, aquatint, drypoint and photogravure—and variations of each of these. He pushes these traditional printmaking techniques to new areas, advancing his own language of drawing and image making within the medium, while treating the processes without a hierarchy within printmaking or other forms of artistic expression.

At times humorous, philosophical, mythical, personal, and meditative, ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ is a moving tour-de-force that reveals the inner workings of Kentridge’s mind and his processes of creation. Themes, images, and even artworks themselves appear and reappear throughout the nine episodes, uniting the episodes in one collective self portrait of the artist.

The present work is a large stone lithograph produced in collaboration with Idem in Paris. This historic workshop is a continuation of workshops began in the 1880s in Paris, where lithography has been an important process since it came into regular use. William has been working with Idem Paris for 20 years, and they have produced 15 lithographs together in total.