Exhibition preview

Thus, the exhibition spans from the Occupations and Heroic Symbols of the 1960s and 1970s to Robert Fludd's natural philosophical reflections on the rela tionship between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and from the field and sea battle fantasies of Velimir Khlebnikov and the Heavenly Palaces of the Jewish Kabbalah to the enigmatic Women of Antiquity, scarcely remembered beyond their names. Finally, the leaden libraries come into view – and with them books and writing, in objects and images, as references to stored knowledge, history and literature. Kiefer also turns his attention to Madame de Staël’s (overly) idealized view of German poets and thinkers 6 of a sometimes dark Romanticism, as well as to the traumas that shaped the work of poet the Paul Celan. His poetry, which Kiefer deeply admired, powerfully and profoundly refuted Adorno’s assertion that it would be impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz without aestheticizing the horror. Mao’s poisoned slogan, “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” also finds a response in Kiefer’s work. “In my paintings,” says the artist, “I tell stories to show what lies behind history. I dig a hole and crawl through.” His battered works – exposed to ash, fire, storm, and rain – become stages for these exca vations. The supposed “devastation” of their vast 7 surfaces is intended less as a reflection of the bound less devastation humanity inflicts on itself and the planet than as a symbol of reclamation, and of the ultimately greater endurance of untamed nature.

In his monumental woodcut The Four Elements (1997/2011), Kiefer depicts a dark sunflower, on the verge of death, yet with a head already full of seeds again. Inspired by the English natural philosopher Robert Fludd (1574–1637) – who believed that every plant on Earth corresponds to a star in the firmament, and thus posited a connection between microcosm and macrocosm – the artist searches for clues to the origin of the universe.

His tools, however, are not telescopes or particle accelerators, but his works themselves. “Art,” says Kiefer, “always has to do with appropriating the incomprehensible (...). I am not a painter like Matisse or Delacroix; I use materials as colors and colors as substances (...) and the materials (...) carry within them a spiritual meaning.”