Between: keifer

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Monday, 31 March 2025

Artlyst: The Art Diary April 2025

My April Art Diary for Artlyst has been published today:

"Easter regularly brings exhibitions exploring themes drawn from Christianity; this year is no exception. For the April 2025 Diary, I highlight exhibitions that include work from Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, Francis Hoyland, Nic Fiddian-Green, Gert Swart, and Stanley Spencer. I also highlight exhibitions exploring aspects of mythology that feature work by Tunga, Sidney Nolan and Anselm Keifer, and exhibitions on social action including the latest Human Atlas exhibition by Marcus Lyon and a fundraiser for War Child. I finish up with two exhibitions on the theme of colour in art: Richard Kenton Webb’s Manifesto of Painting and Colour at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton."

For more on Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone see here, here, here, here, and here; Richard Kenton Webb see here, here, and here; Marcus Lyon see here and here; Sidney Nolan see here and here; and Stanley Spencer, see here, here and here.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Josh Garrels - White Owl.

Sunday, 24 March 2024

Meditation on Anselm Kiefer’s Palm Sunday

Meditation on Anselm Kiefer’s Palm Sunday - Thursday 28th May 2009, Tate Modern

Dead diagonal
transecting space
dusty, dirty palm
bleached of life
red clay
ball of roots
leaves droop
and trail
once fertile
now fragile
creviced trunk
bridges root ball
and limp
foliage bush

two walls -
39 framed panels
stacked three panels high –
are backdrop
to the palm diagonal
desert landscapes
composed of leaves
and sand
hieratic bleached leaves
tangled twigs
discarded clothing
dead matter
constructing created
mindscapes for the soul

Vast vistas -
cracked clay
dry surfaces -
death and decay
sterility and stasis
worlds shattered
and broken
apocalyptic
thirsty lands
praying for water

39
and the installation
forming 40 -
40 desert days
and nights
demonic temptations
forming
repentance sermons
Where are
our roots?
Have we lost
our roots?
Are we
torn up
by our roots?
Is our world
sterile, shallow,
cracked, breaking,
dry, dusty,
diseased, dirty,
dead?

Words written
in sand –
“vater”
“psalmsonntag”
“domenica
belle palme” –
words written
in sand –
pregnant pause
transient scribing
before
pointed challenge
and rocks
falling from hands
onto sand

An event
containing
death and life
turning on
signs in sand
water in desert
life in death
restoration in ruins
An installation
containing
creative dryness
constructive discards
where dead
things live as
objects of reflection
where discards
are reimagined
recombined
reworked
recreated
from detritus
and decay
dust
and destruction

Palm Sunday -
a festival
containing its
own apocalypse
and apotheosis
a welcome
that become
a waylaying
a celebration
that became
a condemnation
a crucifixion
that became
a resurrection

Palms torn
from a living tree
are thrown
in the dust
as welcome
to be trodden
underfoot
and discarded
bleached
by the noonday
sun
these
discarded palms
gathered up
centuries later
for artistic
recreation

Is this
object
installation
and moment
of reflection
a pregnant
pause
a creative
sign in sand
a recreative
refashioning
reforming
from the
dry
discarded
and detritic
the sterile
stagnant
and static?

National Galleries of Scotland say:

'Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday)' refers to the Biblical story of Christ’s journey into Jerusalem shortly before his arrest and execution, when worshippers laid palm leaves in his path. Kiefer’s recent installation comprises thirty paintings featuring palm fronds and stems, alongside a palm tree cast in resin. As the prelude towards Christ’s eventual death, the story symbolises for the artist, the moment between triumph and destruction. Laid on the gallery floor, the fallen tree echoes the body of Christ before his resurrection, suggesting both mortality and eventual renewal.

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Mark Heard - Rise From The Ruins.

Sunday, 11 December 2022

Artlyst - Christmas: The Art Of Faith December 2022 Diary

My December diary for Artlyst includes mention of Fruits of the Spirit, Theaster Gates, Anselm Keifer, Forrest Bess, and Tom Phillips:

'There was a time when Nativity exhibitions routinely featured among the Christmas offerings from London Galleries. Those days are no more but as galleries and curators now acknowledge the extent to which many artists engage with questions of faith and spirituality, it is not hard to find exhibitions exploring such questions at this time of year ...

[The Forrest Bess] exhibition marks the first time his works have been presented together in this way and continues the long and respected history of the Camden Art Centre in platforming exhibitions of significant 20th century artists who have been overlooked in the UK, while also engaging with themes of spirituality. This approach is motivated by an awareness that such artists offer a particular, timely and relevant source of inspiration to contemporary artists and their practices, as well as speaking to urgent issues and ideas of our time.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Bob Dylan - Goodbye Jimmy Reed.

Monday, 13 October 2014

Manessier and Keifer: Spirituality, revelation and religious affiliation

The latest ArtWay meditation is about Alfred Manessier’s The Passion According to Matthew. Jérôme Cottin writes that ‘During World War II he went through a double conversion: to Christianity and to non-figurative art. Actually it was the first that led to the latter. Manessier came from a non-believing family. He turned to the Christian faith in September 1943, when he heard a choir of monks sing the Salve Regina in the Trappist monastery of Soligny.’

Cottin notes that Manessier ‘belongs to the rare group of artists who were well-known internationally as well as sincere believers.’

Interestingly, Kathleen Soriano writes, in the catalogue for Anselm Keifer’s RA retrospective, that Keifer also had a revelation whilst at a monastery: ‘During a trip in 1966 to La Tourette, the Dominican monastery designed by Le Corbusier near Eveux, in eastern France, Keifer spent three weeks in a cell meditating on the fundamental questions of life. It was at La Tourette that he ‘discovered the spirituality of concrete’.

In contrast to Cottin, Soriano notes that ‘The search for transcendence, the connection between heaven and earth, God and man, lies at the heart of Keifer’s oeuvre, despite the fact that he would not consider himself a religious man.’

While both are, no doubt, factually correct in articulating the personal stances on faith of these two artists, it is interesting to consider why it is important to both writers to mention these specifically.

Tyler Green has written of ‘the art world’s indifference toward religion’, James Elkins of the strange place of religion in contemporary art and Dan Fox has stated that religious art ‘when it’s not kept safely confined within gilt frames in the medieval departments of major museums, is taboo.’

Rob Colvin writes that:

‘The close relationship that art and religion maintained for several millennia has in recent decades eroded so drastically that it’s difficult to imagine fine arts and contemporary religion having anything in common. Art is, on the whole, a secular enterprise, and religion is frequently more anesthetic than aesthetic in character. The two worlds happily foster vulgar understandings of each other almost to a point of pride. Some might even suggest that adherence to one entails a rejection of, or at least critical distance from, the other.'

Benedict Read in his 1998 lecture to the Royal Society of British Sculptors noted that following the Second World War: “Churches were being repaired. New work was being installed in them. There was an expansion of church buildings with works of art in them … There is an alternative world there of the commissioning of art for specific purposes that, with no disrespect to established art historians, simply doesn't feature in our notion of cultural history in the post-war period.”

Fox suggests that art about religion is totally kosher however; as are: “modernist dalliances with spiritualism;” the “obsessive cosmologies and prophecies” of ‘visionary’ or ‘outsider’ artists; and “a little dusting of Buddhism or Eastern philosophy.” But, “contemporary artists who openly declare affiliation to Judaeo-Christian or Islamic religions are usually regarded with the kind of suspicion reserved for Mormon polygamists and celebrity Scientologists.” David Morgan has explained this phenomonen by suggesting that, "Moving through the discourse of Modernism in art was a dominant conception of the sacred, one which distanced art from institutional religion, most importantly Christianity, in order to secure the freedom of art as an autonomous cultural force that was sacralized in its own right."

Why is the art world wary of religion? Fox gives five reasons:

1. “For most of the 20th century, art aligned itself with progressive rationalist secularity and radical subjectivity; the ideas that have fed into art come from modern philosophy, liberal or radical politics, sociology and pop culture rather than theology.”

2. “It’s also a question of finance: the money that funds art doesn’t come from churches or religious orders like it did hundreds of years ago.”

3. “Religion is broadly seen by many progressive thinkers to be a cause of intolerance and war.”

4. “The early 21st century has been characterised by a dangerous return to faith-based political conviction, be it radical Islam or neo-conservative fundamentalist Christianity, neither of which has much sympathy for cutting-edge art or ideas.”

5. “Also, religious organisations aren’t, of course, exactly known for their forward thinking attitudes to women or sexuality: the moral teachings of many religious denominations can be at odds with the ways artists want to live their lives.”

Keifer fits this thesis well and Soriano is also thinking within it when she writes that he ‘would not consider himself a religious man.’ In his 2011 Guardian article A Life in Art: Anselm Keifer Nicholas Wroe wrote:

‘Although his move to France coincided with an intensified investigation of myth and religion in his work, Kiefer is no longer a practising Catholic, but acknowledges that "even people who seem not to be spiritual still long for something; I'm sure this is the reason we have art and poetry. I think without spirituality we cannot live, and in this respect the best religion is Hinduism, which teaches that each religion can contain some little truth. Art is an attempt to get to the very centre of truth. It never can, but it can get quite close. It is the dogmatism of the church, the idea that words can express a single truth over hundreds of years, that is complete nonsense. The world changes. Language changes, everything changes. Paintings certainly change.’

Cottin, however, has studied the relationship of modern art to Christianity in the French-speaking world, writes regularly about Christianity and art, edits the website www.protestantismeetimages.com, and is ‘a Calvinist who is at pains to justify the importance of visual theology to the Protestant world.’ As a result, his focus is on those who either belong ‘to the rare group of artists who were well-known internationally as well as sincere believers’ or have produced significant examples of modern religious art. His book La mystique de l’art: Art et christianisme de 1900 à nos jours accordingly features in-depth studies of the work of individual artists such as Gauguin, Ensor, Arnulf Rainer, Picasso, Schmidt-Rottluff, Rouault, Chagall, Bacon, Jawlensky, Manessier, Nolde, Richier.

Both are correct but from different perspectives. Soriano writes of religious affiliation from within the viewpoint of the mainstream art world, while Cottin, from his perspective outside that world, focuses attention on those artists who have expressed religious affiliation within the mainstream art world. The story of religious art in the twentieth century is but one story among many in modernism. However the historical accuracy of the history of modernism can be enhanced through the telling of that tale in a way that refuses to see the predominant separation between art and institutional religion (Christianity, in particular) as being the only game in town.

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Van Morrison - In The Garden.

Saturday, 13 September 2014

Anselm Keifer and Barjac

There is considerable anticipation of the Anselm Keifer retrospective to be held at the Royal Academy of Arts shortly. The Guardian has an interesting article today about Barjac, the home and studio complex near Nîmes in the south of France, to which Keifer moved in 1992. Michael Prodger writes of Keifer's, 'vast pictures, thick with paint and embedded with objects from sunflowers and diamonds to lumps of lead, nod to the Nazis and Norse myth, to Kabbalah and the Egyptian gods, to philosophy and poetry, and to alchemy and the spirit of materials' and suggests that 'the Kiefer worldview is best seen at La Ribaute, his 200 acre compound near Barjac.'

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.

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U2 - Every Breaking Wave.

Thursday, 20 September 2012

Maciej Hoffman: the collision of thoughts with reality

All the angst of the world seems spilled out in drips, splatters and gestural brushstrokes on the huge unstretched canvases of Maciej Hoffman's current exhibition at Walthamstow's Tokarska Gallery. The distressed surfaces depict equally distressed characters with existential Expressionist force and a seeming spontaneity of style.

'Disquiet', 'Powerless', 'Nameless', 'Confused', 'Agitator'; Hoffman's titles are accurate indicators of his content. These are grandiose dramatic works full of the tension and conflict by which Hoffman is frequently seized; the collision of thoughts with reality. Stress and fear flow from the problems of the everyday through the walls of his studio to rip apart the work. Almost all his days, he says, are accompanied by stress and the fear of danger, encircled, as he is, by a world in which a price is paid for each breath.

The child of artists, Hoffman was antagonistic to following in his parents footsteps which resulted in a "troubled" childhood. He was a teenager during the beginning of martial law in Poland. Then came the fall of communism and his immersion in the birth of Polish “capitalism, post-communism”. For fifteen years he worked for one of the biggest Polish advertisement agencies yet this freedom to use art for commercial purposes combined with the unrelenting dominance of the profit principle came to seem as much of a trap and constraint as that which he had experienced under communism.

Hoffman is interested in art as freedom. His sense is that our control systems for classification, measurement and supervision are narrowing our space for what is irrational, imperfect or disordered. Artistic creation remains the one real margin of freedom we can use. His fluid, gestural manipulation of paint on canvas is seemingly raw, random, unfinished, and yet the emotional impact of his angst is as great as the size of the works themselves. Soutine, de Kooning, Keifer are inspirations and references but Hoffman is assuredly his own man with his own tortured vision.

Maciej Hoffman's paintings are at the Tokarska Gallery until 6 October, Thur - Sat, 12pm - 7pm.

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Lou Reed - Sad Song.

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Anselm Keifer - The Waves of Sea and Love

Viewing Anselm Keifer's current exhibition at White Cube Hoxton after the Japanese tsunami turns the pathos quotient up high as Keifer's work explores the fragility of humanity in the face of oceanic forces.

Keifer's installations commonly form rooms which submerge the viewer in their imagery, an approach which is particularly relevant to his theme of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love) with its sense of barely keeping our heads above water.

Twenty-four panoramic seascapes hung three deep fill the side walls of the main gallery. These are photographs which Keifer has distressed using various techniques including electrolysis. Peaceful static scenes of beach and ocean are stirred into violent life by these methods and superimposed on each is a gynaecological instrument suggestive of figures running, jumping or swimming in the maelstrom. Five vitrines in the centre of the gallery each hold a book of seascapes over which Keifer has drawn geometric diagrams and mathematical formulae, a reference perhaps to humanity's attempts (ultimately futile in responding to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami) to map and measure the forces of nature. A final work fills the end gallery wall, a massive abstract canvas before which an armed but rusting frigate has been hung. This is, perhaps, the end to which the sea returns the resistence of humanity. In an upper room, Keifer has set a series of smaller-scale photographic seascapes each featuring an image of himself swimming which is to varying degrees overwhelmed by his distressing of paper and image.

Keifer creates spaces for contemplation. His spaces bring viewers to a full stop through their sublime scale and through the awareness they impart of our place within nature and the cosmos. The title of the upper room series 'I hold all the Indias in my hand' is a quotation from the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo who writes of a man gaining a burgeoning consciousness of the universe and his place within it through contemplation of a ring bearing a portrait of his lover. "I hold the starry plains of heaven," he writes, "I hold all Indias in my hand." Keifer's work undercuts our hubris.

Click here to read my meditation on Keifer's Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday).

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The Velvet Underground - Ocean.

Saturday, 12 March 2011

Airbrushed from Art History (20)

The interviews which James Romaine carried out for Objects of Grace provide an interesting survey of artists expressing their faith in and through contemporary art and those that they view as peers or influences.

Dan Callis is a visual artist/educator whose work includes painting, drawing, and installation. Currently, his work explores issues of visual hybridization, arising from the interaction between artifice and ecology, spontaneity and the mediation.

When he spoke to Romaine, Callis explored connections between his work and that of Anselm Keifer:

"There is a strange sense of longing and mourning, also a sense of reckoning. The layering of imagery and material makes the work operate somewhere between memory and vision ... The work is so grounded in the history of painting and at the same time it transcends the issues that have hamstrung painters in the last two decades. This what I hope for my work. To acknowledge my traditions and use those traditions as a vehicle (or at least the fuel) to break free of the current orbital confines ...

Memory is made in place. Place is the ecosystem for memory. memory is story, individual and/or collective, and that occurs in place. This is history. That idea has been the common connection of all my work, the idea of memory, location (place) and community ...

I understand part of my role as an artist is to be a storyteller and I understand this role to be a redemptive act. I think that is one of the things that our works share: this belief in the redemptive quality of the art. The redemption comes, in part, from remembering. I would hope to evoke something forgotten, something important yet forgotten. I see that in Keifer's work. I also see in his work the role of the artist as a mediator or facilitator between memory and place ...

As a culture we are creating images at such a rapid pace and the bulk of these images are purely for consumption. Our memories are so meshed in the audio and visual drown of our commodity economy that we desperately need places to slow down, to reflect, to remember. And in this remembering there can be mourning, there can be celebration, and there can be reconciliation. I hope in some way my work locates or fixes the viewer in the space they are occupying and at the same time transcends that space. Keifer's work does that for me."

Callis thinks it is very exciting and dynamic time in the contemporary art world which is ripe with opportunity:

"With artists like Keifer, Robert Gober, or Kiki Smith, there are serious, spiritual questions being asked. It appears that we continue to be in a major period of flux and that means everything is up for question. As an artist of faith I believe it is paramount that we maintain a relevant place in the conversation. I think of the Southern California artist Tim Hawkinson, who showed in the 1999 Venice Biennial and ... Whitney Biennial. He and his wife, Patty Witkin (an accomplished painter and professor at UCLA) both are committed artists of faith and very active in the contemporary scene. I also think of Canadian artist, Betty Spackman, and her Austrian collaborator, Anja Westerfrölke. Both women are strong and committed believers and very active in the European art scene (including exhibiting their work at Documenta)."

Albert Pedulla is a sculptor who makes mixed media installations and who has shown his work at museums and alternative spaces including the Museum of Fine Arts - Houston, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, City Without Walls, and many college campuses across the North East of America.

Pedulla views his work as questioning some of the Enlightenment foundations of Modernism and its self-satisfaction at the same time that Modernism is still the vocabulary he has to use in order to be engaged woth or relevant to this time. One of his disenchantments with Modernism is:

"The idea that could be created in an autonomous sphere that has nothing to do with the rest of life ... The artist, like anyone else, has to consider the consequences of their work. I think that, to a certain extent, the Modernist artist has done a disservice to culture and the public by not giving back to culture something that is of use ...

a holdover from the Enlightenment and Modernism ... holds that the real truth is in analytic proof that can be factually verified. This reduces Truth to fact ... Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence for which is still unseen ...

What is seen is the subject; the content is hidden except to those who are willing to discern it. In Wall Object #4 (With Fire and Light), the fire which is unseen to the viewer creates the marks which are seen. The illumination is created by a light source which is unseen. The idea, the faith ... also relates to the act of art making in general. It suggests the prayerful attitude that an artist can bring to her work. The artist's work can be a visual manifestation of an invisible prayer. By faith, the artist's prayers may be seen."

As a younger artist, Pedulla was very interested in the work of Sol LeWitt:

"He does many of his works directly on the wall, and my work is also directly on the wall. I find his work to be optically very beautiful but LeWitt's work is less critical of Modernism. I think my work is arguing with him at the same time it is engaging Modernism."

One artist he is very interested in is Robert Gober:

"Even though his work looks very different than mine, he seems to have a similar ambivalence about Modernism and is engaged in the question of true spirituality as contrasted with the clinical, closed, spirituality of Modernism. So I feel a certain kindred spirit with his work. Yet, on the surface, I don't think people would categorize us together."

Tim Rollins says:

"What is funny is that artists like Serrano and Gober, and even Mapplethorpe, were maybe trying to transcend the limitations and boundaries of denominational organized religion by creating these critiques, in which they engaged and challenged church traditions and doctrines. Many people mistake critique for sacrilege. I often wonder what Christ would have thought of Piss Christ? I think he would have agreed with the ethos of it, to be frank. I mean, most people think Piss Christ is a glorious image, glowing, and they're just ready to shout and get down on their knees and pray until they do find out that it is urine. It is a critique. You have a cheap plastic crucifix that represents how Christ was sold and how Christ really had to suffer rejection and hung out with literally the scum of the earth. But the light that comes out of it, and how you can make something that beautiful. When I see particular works, like Piss Christ, I moved by the pathos of them. They're not just vandalizing, or attacking people's faith. It's an honest engagement of what these individuals have been though, often negative encounters with the church ...

Is there something they could say to the artist to persuade them that perhaps this isn't the most beautiful, or this isn't the way to engage with religion or with God? ... That's why it is very important for us to make things that are beautiful, that are glorious, but that can be critical and vital and political simultaneously. Only beauty - love made visible - can change things. I think that is the ethos of Jesus as well. People come to church and they want some of this. I see it in their faces when the choir starts singing and this glory radiates. I see their longing like, "There is something going on here that I have never felt before and I want to feel." We as human beings are biologically wired for spiritual ecstasy. And we try to get it in every form but a one to one connection with the Almighty. I think art is a way to summon that connection. The glory of God - this is what we seek to demonstrate in our art. This is what I feel in front of great works of art."

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The Blind Boys of Alabama ft Lou Reed - Jesus.