Growing up, and as an art student, Kentridge was disinterested in both visual abstraction and the insurgence of conceptual art of America and Europe. Kentridge grew up witnessing Apartheid, and grave realities of this world. He naturally gravitated to figurative art. He claimed conceptual art seemed too "distant" and even “inappropriate” from the South African context. Even Joseph Beuys’ work seemed an indulgence from such an authentically survivalist viewpoint.

Kentridge first gained international attention in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. His groundbreaking work poetically fused social commentary and received international acclaim. He continued to be politically active in Johannesburg, without making specific targets, or lambasting individuals. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s he showed mixed-media work that reflected the dark realities and history of his homeland, and the state of the human condition.

As fitting medium, Kentridge arrived at charcoal and paper. He was fond of the “low tech” drawing medium, and it seemed suitable for socially charged work which had precedent for him (indeed: Max Beckman, Kathe Kollwitz were his influences) His renderings are often harsh and forceful. Kentridge ironically claimed, it is charcoal’s: “softness and quickness on the paper” that attracted him most as a drawing medium. Charcoal became the graphic underpinning of all of his work and, (-Neal Benezra, MCA catalog) Kentridge himself humbly refers to his own technique as “stone-age filmmaking”.

Kentridge creates images of his native South Africa, some of the “characters” that appear, including versions of self-portraits. His animations are themselves a form of aggression: figures being marred and swallowed or dissolved into the landscapes, an echo of the bleak environment and safety insecurities during the time of Apartheid. His images can include grimly-rendered terrain, bleeding corpses, or the entire evaporation of bodies into the earth. Important personeas appear time-and-time-again in his drawings, with novel or curious names like: SOHO ECKSTEIN, and FELIX TEITTELBAUM (here) Above all, it seemed Kentridge seemed most keen on satirizing the upper-class, hypocritical society, and it’s manners. (ala: Otto Dix)

“He first began to film his individual character drawings as early as 1985, recording each stage of their development, rather that working toward a specific, deliberate image.” (-Staci Boris) Animation seemed to evolve naturally out of his drawings. He originally wanted to film changes in a drawing. (here) He felt that the drawing “hit their peak somewhere in the middle of their making”. He wished to chronicle through film, each sequential stage of a drawing’s formation. This allowed him to exist solely in the moment of the drawing’s life. Each addition or erasure of charcoal should be considered equal. A record of a drawing’s journey and ghostly reminders. “His interest in process and change and the correlation he finds between the shifting character of the landscape and the ephemeral nature of memory, led him ultimately to an art form that is constantly in motion : Animation” (–Staci Boris)

Kentridge’s 1999 film STEREOSCOPE was the first to travel without the accompaniment of drawings. (here)

DRAWINGS FOR PROJECTION is a series featuring the fictional character SOHO ECKSTEIN, a mine owner and property developer in Johannesburg (like Gorge Grosz depiction of the bourgeoisie, and Max Beckman’s businessmen in Weimar Germany) “Kentridge exposes the protagonist to the vagaries of life in Apartheid and post-Apartied South Africa” (–Betti Sue Hertz)

TIDE TABLE 2003-4, (here) takes place on the seashore of a wealthy resort. As usual, there is a smokey 20th century mood, a quasi-modernist style (–Betti Sue Hertz.) Things turn even darker: cows appear and disappear; later cabanas turn into slaughterhouses, cut to children playing in the water. A peaceful seaside resort is interrupted by military. The melting charcoal montages show suffering bodies lying on hospital beds...an allusion to the African AIDS epidemic?