William Kentridge is undoubtedly the best known South African artist, currently in demand by major institutions all over the world. Working with what is in essence a very restricted technique - charcoal drawings with limited touches of pastel colour - Kentridge has deployed these drawings into an oeuvre of astounding depth.

The drawings have been used as the basis for a series of animated films by the very simple technique of drawing, filming a few frames, erasing, then drawing some more and so on.

Conceptually, too, Kentridge has worked from a fixed point: a reflection of his life and surroundings in Johannesburg.

From this centre, Kentridge has worked outwards, turning the videos into the backdrops for astonishing and magical theatrical productions.

Collaborations with the Handspring Puppet Company, these productions are animated with three-quarter life-size wooden puppets carved from his drawings, and based on classics like Woyzeck and Faustus and Ubu as seen through the lens of the artist's Johannesburg experience, with footnotes drawn from an eclectic series of sources which include colonial engravings, hospital paraphernalia, botanical drawings, maps and anatomical dissections.

The same themes have been addressed in the many powerful etchings, lithographs and silkscreens completed by the artist through the years.

The artist states:

"I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay."

On living a lifetime in Johannesburg: "I have never been able to escape Johannesburg, and in the end, all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and the films are certainly spawned by, and feed off, the brutalised society left in its wake."

On his drawings: "The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion."

While the London Sunday Times critic read the Serpentine show as a manifestation of white South African guilt, respected Guardian critic Adrian Searle, in an extended and highly commendatory review, described Kentridge's work as "so arresting, so unexpected and so unplaceable that it is truly refreshing".