Let Me Live Again

Notes

This printer’s proof is a unique impression created by William Kentridge exclusively for Kunsthalle Praha on the occasion of the private contemporary art museum’s inaugural exhibition, KINETISMUS: 100 Years of Electricity in Art (2022). It is the only impression available in South Africa.

The héliogravure depicts Kentridge in his studio, at work on a large still-life charcoal drawing later presented in A Natural History of the Studio (2025), the artist’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York. The exhibition also featured Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, a nine-part film series shot in his Johannesburg studio during, and in the aftermath of, the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–22.

Opened in 2022, Kunsthalle Praha is housed in a former electrical substation near the centre of Prague. The inaugural exhibition reflected the building’s industrial heritage and explored the impact of electricity on artistic practice from the early 20th Century to the present. It brought together more than 90 works by multiple generations of artists, including Kentridge, alongside pioneering modernists such as László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Duchamp.

Kunsthalle Praha is currently presenting The Battle Between YES and NO, the first major exhibition in Czechia dedicated to Kentridge (on view until 7 September 2026). The exhibition title refers to a series of prints and animations in which Kentridge playfully interrogates affirmation and negation, collapsing the words “Yes” and “No” into “Noise”. The exhibition traces the artist’s working process and his long-standing engagement with themes of exile, language and desire.

The present lot was produced in a limited run of 50 editioned prints created as part of the multimedia installation Notes Towards a Model Opera. ¹ The work offers a glimpse into the artist's Johannesburg studio, capturing a moment within his creative environment. The image appears largely unstaged, providing a candid view of Kentridge's process. At the lower right of the composition, the reference image for the larger-than-life charcoal still life can be seen resting on a table alongside smaller charcoal studies of the same subject.

In this work, the artist subverts his characteristic use of the moving image by presenting a still héliogravure. The depth and layering afforded by the medium resonate quietly with Kentridge’s enduring concerns: histories of excavation and erasure, the sedimentation of time, and the manner in which memory leaves its own tonal deposits.²

The medium also offers a compelling contrast to the artist’s working process. While Kentridge appears energetic and almost frenetic, with motion lines suggesting rapid hand movements as charcoal is transferred to the page, the process of creating a héliogravure is meticulous and highly considered. The printmaking process serves as a carefully calibrated translation of the artist's process into etched depressions in copper, yielding ink on paper through disciplined scientific procedures.³

^1. No author (2022) Kunsthalle Praha Design Shop, Let Me Live Again –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ William Kentridge, online, accessed 1 June 2026.

^2. Zhané Warren (no date) Warren Editions, From Studio to Film to Héliogravure: spanning the work of William Kentridge in Studio Life, online, accessed 1 June 2026.

^3. Ibid.

Details of the inked plate before printing. Image courtesy of Warren Editions.