The Ravello Festival brings music and visual art together this year. From July 3 to September 5, 2026, Villa Rufolo hosts an exhibition of works by South African artist William Kentridge, organized in collaboration with Galleria Lia Rumma as part of the festival’s 74th edition. The opening on July 3 is preceded by a conversation with curator Bartolomeo Pietromarchi at Palazzo Avino.
Drawing as a living process
William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, where he still lives and works today. His practice weaves together drawing, animated film, sculpture, printmaking, performance, and opera direction. At the center of it all, though, remains drawing, which he understands as a process of transformation, erasure, and montage, never as a fixed image.
It’s precisely this connection to music and theatre that makes Ravello a natural home for his exhibition.
What’s more, Kentridge has long worked in opera as well.
He has directed productions such as Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Shostakovich’s The Nose, and Berg’s Lulu and Wozzeck.
These were staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, at La Scala in Milan, and at the Salzburg Festival.
Key works in the exhibition
At William Kentridge Villa Rufolo, you will find the piece Preparing the Flute (2005).
It is a video projection onto a miniature theatre model.
Additionally, it references his production of The Magic Flute for La Monnaie opera in Brussels.
What’s more, the small stage becomes a space of projections and apparitions. The Enlightenment imagination of Mozart’s opera meets colonial history here. And power, surrounding that history, adds another dimension.
Táto kombinácia vytvára intímny priestor, ktorý prepája čas a kontext. Navyše, divák si uvedomuje súvislosť medzi osudom postáv a historickými silami.
Theatre Drawing I (2008) ties drawing directly to La Fenice’s architecture.
Moreover, in Sibyl (2020), words appear, scatter, and recompose themselves.
Fugitive Words (2024) works similarly, turning language into visual and mental matter.
William Kentridge Villa Rufolo illustrates a comparable synthesis of form and idea.
The exhibition’s newest piece, Mayakovsky Diorama (2025), fuses the diorama with shadow theatre and references Vladimir Mayakovsky.
The exhibition extends into the gardens
Additionally, the path continues outdoors too, across the villa’s terraces and gardens.
Okrem toho sa sochy s antropomorfnými siluetami, napríklad Paper Procession (2023), zapájajú do dialógu s architektúrou. Navyše to potvrdzuje dialóg medzi dielom a priestorom.
The work becomes a physical presence in space, a body in relation to light and the landscape of the Amalfi Coast.
Why Ravello
Villa Rufolo’s roots reach back to the 13th century. It originally belonged to the powerful Rufolo family, so renowned in trade that Boccaccio himself immortalized one of its members in the Decameron. The villa gained its present form, gardens included, through a restoration by the Scotsman Francis Neville Reid in the 19th century.
It was in these very gardens, in 1880, that Richard Wagner experienced the moment that changed the site’s history. Overcome by the villa’s beauty, he pictured it as the garden of Klingsor from the second act of his Parsifal. In commemoration of that visit, a Wagnerian concert is still held here every year. The Ravello Festival was founded in 1953 on this very legacy, and from the start has built on the connection between sound, vision, and landscape, the same principle at the heart of Kentridge’s own work.
Kentridge in Prague too
If you can’t make it to Villa Rufolo, you can catch Kentridge’s work. Kunsthalle Praha is hosting his exhibition The Battle Between YES and NO / Souboj mezi ANO a NE through September 7, 2026.
