Pace Gallery Doubles Down on Kentridge's Anti-Imperial Imagination — and the Memes Are Already Circling

Pace Gallery used the closing days of June to roll out a new William Kentridge cycle called AlgaeBTQ+, billed as a meditation on algae blooms, queer ecology, and the slow violence of extractive economies. The marketing copy, lifted almost verbatim by Hyperallergic in its 27 June 2026 newsletter, frames the South African artist's latest work as a continuation of his decades-long project of using the body — damaged, bespectacled, colonial — to stage an argument against empire. The gallery wants the public to read the show as solemn, prophetic, and timely. The internet, characteristically, is reading it as content.

The thesis this publication intends to defend is straightforward: the most consequential art of the next cycle will be work that refuses the separation between the museum and the meme — and Pace, an institution that spent two decades perfecting that separation, has now staked its summer on an artist who makes the merger unavoidable. Whether the gallery understands what it has bought is the open question.

The official reading

Kentridge has long been the rare artist with simultaneous standing in three precincts: the contemporary-art market, the post-colonial literary canon, and the institutional left. His charcoal-and-animated films — Felix in Exile, Ubu Tells the Truth, the Nine Drawings series — have been taught in universities for a generation as textbook examples of how to render the psychic damage of late-apartheid South Africa without collapsing into either allegory or victimhood. Pace, which has represented Kentridge in North America, presents the new work in that lineage: an artist who has earned the right to be heard before he speaks.

The Hyperallergic newsletter describes AlgaeBTQ+ as Kentridge turning from the mine and the courtroom toward the wetland, the estuary, the microscopic organism that turns carbon into oxygen and toxins into the colour we read as pollution. Algae in this framing is a stand-in for the systems that keep an empire functioning invisibly — and for the queer, polysexual, non-binary life that survives inside those systems. The gallery, in other words, is selling anti-imperial seriousness with a queer-ecology wrapper, and pricing it accordingly.

The counter-reading

The other reading is that the show is doing exactly the work that the contemporary gallery market needs it to do in 2026: naming a political position that is broadly accepted by the educated audience the gallery courts, in vocabulary that requires no real sacrifice from anyone who consumes it. Aquatic ecology is a safe cause. Queer ecology is a safe cause. The pairing of the two, in a body of work by an artist with a quarter-century of curatorial goodwill, is the contemporary equivalent of a green ribbon on a black-tie dress.

This is not a new charge against Kentridge, and Hyperallergic's coverage gestures toward it by foregrounding the speed with which the show's visual language has been clipped, screenshotted, and remixed online. The newsletter notes that within hours of the press images circulating, several of Kentridge's algae forms had been repurposed as reaction images and profile pictures on the platforms where gallery coverage actually lives — X, Bluesky, Instagram — and that at least one of those memes had been folded back into political commentary about the Trump administration's new reflecting-pool renovation on the National Mall. The pool, in the meme, becomes the algae bloom. The algae bloom becomes Kentridge. Kentridge becomes a joke about imperial overreach.

The structural frame

What is happening here is the predictable collision between two economies that have spent a decade pretending they are not the same economy. The first is the gallery market, which sells scarcity, provenance, and singular authorship at prices calibrated to a clientele for whom a million-dollar Kentridge is a rounding error. The second is the attention economy, which treats every image as raw material for remix, and every signature as a meme waiting to happen. The two systems are now technically fused — the same image must perform as a six-figure object and as a free, shareable unit of discourse.

The dominant wire coverage treats Kentridge's algae as a piece of serious content that happens to have produced a few light memes around the edges. That framing flatters the gallery and protects the price. The more honest reading is that the memes are not at the edges of the show — they are the show's actual afterlife, and the place where Kentridge's argument about extractive systems is most likely to do political work. A charcoal drawing hanging in a Park Avenue viewing room will be seen by a few thousand people. A Kentridge meme will be seen by a few million, and most of them will not know or care who made the original. That is, arguably, the artist's stated thesis rendered in practice.

Stakes

What Pace has bought, whether it knows it or not, is a position in a debate the gallery market has avoided for a generation: whether high art is now, structurally, an upstream supplier of memes, and whether the institutions that claim to safeguard the one can survive the consequences of funding the other. The bet the gallery is making is that the answer is no — that scarcity, signature, and price will continue to insulate the work. The counter-bet, embedded in the way the imagery is already travelling, is that the insulation has failed and the next decade of cultural politics will be fought out in the comment thread, not the catalogue raisonné.

What remains genuinely uncertain is whether Kentridge himself has consented to this redistribution. He has, by long habit, treated his own imagery as something that moves through the world without his permission — that is the ethical premise of the anti-apartheid work, after all. But AlgaeBTQ+ lands at a moment when the meme economy is no longer peripheral to political life, and the question of whether a senior gallery artist can credibly claim ambivalence about his own virality is one the sources do not resolve.

This piece treats Kentridge's work as a serious intervention into imperial ecology that the contemporary market has commodified into a product — and treats the meme circulation documented by Hyperallergic as the work's most consequential reception, against the official gallery framing.

Sources consulted:

• Hyperallergic newsletter, 27 June 2026: Pace, William Kentridge, AlgaeBTQ+ feature.