I'm looking forward to seeing tomorrow Anselm Kiefer's exhibition Il Mistero delle Cattedrali at White Cube Bermondsey. The first work by Kiefer that I saw was his Palmsonntag or Palm Sunday Artist Room at Tate Modern. I was so moved by this piece that I wrote a meditation based on notes and impressions that I jotted down while in the room itself.
Staged across 11,000 sq ft of gallery space, 'Il Mistero delle Cattedrali' is the largest presentation of Kiefer's work ever made in London:
"All of the large-scale canvases on show use landscape as its starting point. Thereafter, Kiefer works on each of them rigorously and with intense physicality and some of the canvases are exposed to the elements. In addition, for this exhibition, many of the large-scale works have undergone an accelerated process of oxidisation. Consequently, images that may be seen to evoke the sublime are themselves subjected to the subtle but immense power of natural forces. 'You have to find a golden path between controlling and not controlling, between order and chaos' Kiefer has observed. 'If there is too much order, it is dead; if there is too much chaos, it doesn't cohere. I'm continually negotiating a path between these two extremes.'"
Ronald Goetz has described Kiefer as a deliberately, if idiosyncratically, religious painter: 'Allusions to his own strangely skewed versions of Christianity, Judaism, gnosticism and alchemy abound, and he has acknowledged that he thinks a great deal about religion ‘‘because science provides no answers." Somber, guilt-ridden, accusing, mocking, enigmatic -- Kiefer’s vision of life, religion, ideology, national identity and history has been charred by the flames of the Holocaust.'
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Low - Don't Understand.
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