- Venue
- Royal Academy, London 27.9 - 14.12.2014
- Location
- London
All hail the King! The heavyweight champ is in town, with the other contender to the throne also due in London at Gagosian from October the 11th. Anselm Kiefer is lead to Richard Serra’s steel. But for now it’s all lead; and sunflowers and hair and straw and glass and ash and clay and everything else. Wrought into the consuming themes of all history, human history and our history.
Marketed as a retrospective, the show covers most of Kiefer’s output, painting dominates, sculpture is less well represented, whereas his primary means the book, begins and ends. The finale being the installation Painting the Rhine, 1982-2013, a giant book through which one literally leaves Kiefer’s spectacle.
The books reveal Kiefer to be a master of watercolour and the wet bleed, with three watery figures swirling into a whirlpool of linear abstraction in one folio. The ambiguity of motif is confirmed by the artist’s assertion that “you do not have to read my books. You only need to scan. I am not picturing words I am trying to recreate a memory. ” Books are one of Kiefer’s major outputs, which in a display context is interesting as only one set of pages can ever be visible at any one time. They are a historicising, but individualistic medium. Yet, the lure of what remains hidden also pervades the larger paintings, as the mind’s eye dissects the layers of painting and under-painting, whilst seeking the provenance of the materials present.
Kiefer is a master symbolist. All the materials on show mean something. Matter, matters. For example, his inclusion of clay refers to its being the substrate for one of the earliest forms of writing in cuneiform. The chronology of his paintings comes to life once Kiefer cuts loose with smears and dollops and drips. Impasto so thick it cracks when drying out. The anythingness of the paint used, animates. Tally this with the incredible spatial illusion, there is an emotional and psychological depth beyond mere physical space. So much so, they feel less like paintings of places, than an immersion in the places themselves.
Beyond meaning is scale, his landscape painting alludes to cosmic and temporal scales, through their never ending horizons and expanses of ‘big skies’. In these kinds of paintings reside the highlights of the show, the bombastic paintings of Speer type temples that suggest the emergence and decay of civilisations. The snowscapes with sticks that become gravestones, interspersed with words from poems of barbed scrawl that reference the holocaust and other genocides. The giant alien lamps of sunflowers peering down at the stricken figure in The Orders of the Night, 1995. Good as they are, they precede the masterpiece and sandstorm of a painting, Für Ingeborg Bachmann: der Sand aus den Urnen, 1998-2009. Constructed from walls of brick, it builds the architecture of some mythological or ancient ziggurat decaying into a maelstrom of wind whipped grains. Below run lines of bricks, which ambiguously resemble the caterpillar tracks of tanks. It is an encompassing, dynamic and highly ambitious painting.
Foible and taste provoke me to mourn the relative lack of sculptural outings, foreshadowed by the dominance of painting. However, Kiefer does return with another three dimensional omnipresence in the courtyard. Outside the RA two giant vitrines have beached. Each contain a shoal of suspended U-boats within. Intriguingly, despite the linear organisation and rationale of the hung movement, some have sunk to the seabed and allude to future fossils like an array of petrified Orthoceras Cephalopods.
Overall, what to conclude? Well, guess what? It’s a tour de force. No surprise there then. A barnstorming show, which simultaneously feels like the past, present and future. Go see it, it’s a no-brainer.
