As Goodman Gallery marks its sixtieth anniversary, William Kentridge has premiered a new nine-minute stop-motion animation, 'A Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction)' — the twelfth instalment in his 'Drawings for Projection' cycle, which he has been building since 1989. The film and its roughly fifty associated drawings anchor a wide-ranging presentation at the gallery's Cork Street space in London, on view until 7 November. The title comes from a collection of early twentieth-century West African proverbs, mostly from Ghana, that Kentridge has drawn on since the 1990s. The starting image was a drawing of the aftermath of a 2023 gas explosion on a Johannesburg thoroughfare, caused by failing infrastructure — an event that pulled the artist toward other destroyed buildings and toward Soho Eckstein, the industrialist antihero who has recurred through the cycle of films. The making was, by Kentridge's account, almost entirely improvisatory. Around fifty charcoal drawings were altered and re-photographed frame by frame — some 14,000 frames in all — with motifs appearing and vanishing along the way. A black cat runs through the film as a herald of the explosion and a spirit of transformation, turning by turns into a typewriter, a cash register, a bare tree and a cremation urn. A separate new bronze, 'Fat Cat', nods to Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita', written in secret in Stalinist Russia. The presentation also folds in new work connected to Kentridge's staging of Monteverdi's 'L'Orfeo' at this year's Glyndebourne Festival, including a Pepper's Ghost installation that merges workshop footage with sculpture and works on paper. In conversation the artist is characteristically evasive about what the work reveals about him — but insistent that drawing remains, in his own phrase, the heart of everything he makes.