William Kentridge: Thick Time
Whitechapel Gallery, London

Twelve years ago, the Whitechapel Gallery staged an exhibition called “Faces in the Crowd” that aimed to re-establish the avant-garde credentials of figurative art. The show included a high proportion of artists’ videos, most of which passed me by in a blur. But one stuck in my mind. By South African artist William Kentridge, it was a roughly drawn animation of crowds surging around a monument to their own labour. It was a moving image, in both senses of the term.

Kentridge’s was a face in the crowd I remembered, and after that I kept bumping into him. At Compton Verney in 2006 I stumbled across his whimsical Journey to the Moon (2003), a fantasy of space travel around the studio involving a rocketing coffee pot and a saucer moon.