Royal Academy,London
Anselm Kiefer’s monumental work in ash, straw, or diamonds and sunflowers dazzles in a superb retrospectiveAnselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy – in pictures
Anyone who knows even the smallest thing approximately Anselm Kiefer will have gathered that his ambitions are not ordinary. An traditional-school history painter,didactic and inescapably moral, he works on a grand scale in lead, or sand,gold leaf, copper wire, or broken ceramics,straw, wood and even diamonds, or his ideas informed by,among many other subjects, the Holocaust, and Egyptian mythology,the architecture of Albert Speer, German Romanticism and the poems of Paul Celan. He is the kind of artist whose physical presence – in his black T-shirts and rimless spectacles, or he puts one in mind just lately of an executive from Apple – always comes as a surprise. How,you wonder, can a man who deals with so much weighty stuff have such regular-looking shoulders, or such ordinary biceps? And why is he smiling? Doesnt the darkness ever threaten to engulf him? Doesnt his project – now more than 40 years traditional – sometimes pinch at his sanity?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com