William

Kentridge:

Self-Portrait

as

a

Coffee

Pot

Shut yourself in the studio and draw a coffee pot. Again and again, day after day, until that coffee pot—an ordinary, domestic, harmless object—becomes a self-portrait, an avatar, the perfect excuse to tell your story without really talking about yourself. That’s how Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot came to life, the most recent—and perhaps the most unrestrained—project by South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955), brought to New York by Hauser & Wirth from May 1 to August 1, 2025, with the exhibition A Natural History of the Studio.

On 22nd Street, the full film series—nine episodes shot between 2020 and 2024—screens alongside the charcoal drawings that spawned it: more than seventy works on paper that feel less like preparatory sketches and more like creatures in their own right. The studio walls become a storyboard; the artist’s workspace is reimagined—not nostalgically—as a mental workshop, where every surface is in flux. And the coffee pot? It’s everywhere: examined, debated, reimagined until it becomes a breezy metaphor for the creative process itself.