calendario eventi  :: 

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28/5/2007

Monumenta 2007

Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris

Anselm Kiefer - Falling Stars

curated by José Alvarez

The glass nave of the Grand Palais allows light to pour down from above, but it also serves as a vast window on the sky. The same sky that haunts so many canvases by Anselm Kiefer, with their powerful sense of material brilliance, of light incarnate – a reflection of Kiefer's deliberate artistic quest to create a new kind of painted light, brighter and more real than the theatrical mirages of so much figurative art. Sternenfall ('Falling Stars') is the title of the first exhibition in the MONUMENTA series. The complex labyrinths of meaning in Kiefer's work find definition and profound coherence through cosmogony and the motif of the star-filled night sky.

The glass vault of the Grand Palais – a veritable cathedral of light – is the perfect counterpoint to the caves and subterranean spaces created by Kiefer at Barjac, his hill-studio and home in southern France. Barjac is Kiefer's 'creative Babel', a place of dreams and the unexpected, set apart from the sound and fury of the modern world, where he draws on the mysterious sources of inspiration that shape and inform his work. Work of extraordinary inventiveness, whose wide-ranging sources embrace the universal themes that shape our individual histories and destinies.

MONUMENTA 2007 consists of ten installations, seven of which are 'houses' – as Kiefer describes them – conceived to the exact scale of the works they contain. Each house is a different size, but all are clad in rusted corrugated iron. In addition to the houses, the installation comprises three monumental sculptures: a tower rising to a height of 17 metres, a second tower of eight metres, and a collapsed tower extending along the ground. MONUMENTA 2007 is a fascinating narrative work, richly philosophical, metaphorical and poetic, expressive of great violence and great humanity. The spectacle of the paintings is inseparable from the materiality of the installation – the canvases are cocooned in their respective settings like precious artefacts, sheltered from the light pouring down from the zenith of the Grand Palais, above.
José Alvarez

Artist and creator Anselm Kiefer conjures matter, time and history in a striking series of visual and architectural installations, on a monumental scale. The emotional power of Kiefer's works is immediately apparent. He invites the viewer to inhabit a creative space where medium and signs merge into one, where man and the world around him are held in the act of perpetual separation and fusion. Sand, branches, celestial bodies, hair, or texts – poetic, scientific or mystical – are so many different 'media,' deployed by this great contemporary master in a series of ambitious, grandiose works.

Through the emotional, questioning character of his work – fundamental components of the human experience and condition – Anselm Kiefer sheds new light on the foundations of our civilisation, penetrating history's darkest transgressions. Refuting the processes of collective amnesia, Kiefer finds new resources to confront the unrepresentable in a series of dazzling visions designed to implicate the viewer in the reconstruction of the fabric of memory and reason. Anselm Kiefer's work places the viewer at the very heart of the encounter between the self, the artist's medium, and memory, engaging us with its expressive power, and profound humanity.

In his monograph on the work of Anselm Kiefer (Thames & Hudson, 2001), the celebrated art historian Daniel Arasse, who died recently, compares his paintings' invocative power to that of the ancient templum, the square of sky defined by Roman augurers for the purposes of divination based on the flight of sacred eagles. The templa defined by Kiefer's canvases, says Arasse, invite the viewer to contemplate the conflict between the transparency of meaning, and the opacity of the medium (as witnessed by the violent physicality of the pictures' making, their palpably tactile quality), between the creative idea and its evaporation during the process of its materialisation in paint.

Anselm Kiefer's work is constantly revisited and re-elaborated, creating an oeuvre of multiple accretions and strata, and accumulations of different media. The dense, thickly-worked paintings are often quite literally attacked by the forces of nature. The diverse elements assembled and used by Kiefer are assimilated into often monumental works defining a spatial and visual landscape of their own. The paintings' striking, powerful materiality transports the visitor – quite literally – to the heart of a monumental artistic vision, an 'art of excess' where time acts as a medium in its own right, and where each of us is invited to lose and find ourselves at will.

Anselm Kiefer's work challenges each of us to question our sense of belonging. This plunge into the depths of introspection enables the artist to examine his intrinsic connection with his own culture, in a new light. His sense of the past is European, the nostalgic past of the German Romantics, a past that touches the collective roots of European culture. Today, this questioning is the pretext for an in-depth exploration of the complexity of our origins, and our ever-problematic relationship with the past, both memorial and immemorial. The quest for identity is an historical, cosmogenic leitmotiv; our response to its call will furnish the elements we need to build our shared future. In his artistic quest for identity, Anselm Kiefer peoples his visual world with a host of invited poets, writers and thinkers. Here are Genet, Rilke, Huysmans, Musil, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Michelet, Hegel, Marx, Benjamin, Khlebnikov… But it is with Celan that he finds his most lasting, complex relationship.

Active on the contemporary art scene since the 1970s, Anselm Kiefer has enjoyed international recognition for many years. His painted works, and his remarkable sculptures, draw on the tragic cataclysms of 20th-century history in attempt to exorcise their essential evil and brutality. Taking their inspiration in a wide variety of cosmogenic motifs, and a Neo-Expressionistic vision of art, Kiefer's paintings are remarkable for their unflinching apprehension and deeply moving depiction of the complex nature of reality. His work is nourished by history, even in its darkest hours, taking strength to resist, with all the vitality of art, the meandering paths of forgetfulness. Anselm Kiefer's work is a call to the young people of today, a memorial for each individual visitor. As the art historian Daniel Arasse has pointed out, his work constitutes a theatre of memory. At the Grand Palais, the theatre assumes the dimensions of a vast, monumental nave.

Anselm Kiefer studied law, literature and linguistics before embarking on his artistic career. His father was a teacher of drawing. Kiefer studied first at the Karlsruhe academy of fine art, and later in Düsseldorf, where he became a pupil of the German artist Joseph Beuys. From the 1970s onwards, his work explored the complex arcana of Germany's post-war identity. In 1980, he exhibited at the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where his work provoked shocked reaction from a number of critics. In 1981, he exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, and quickly became one of the art market's most sought-after names, with a growing international reputation.

Taking inspiration from the great geniuses of world literature, the Kabbalah and ancient Egyptian mythology, Anselm Kiefer played an active role in the renaissance of painting. His extraordinarily vigorous work, sometimes classified as Neo- Expressionist, covers a wide-ranging creative area. Kiefer's work of the 1970s and 1980s (1969-1992) was dedicated to Germanic culture – Resurrexit (1973), To the Unknown Painter (1982), Athanor (1983), Parsifal (1973) – while at the same time introducing one his favourite and most important themes, namely Judaism and, more precisely, the Kabbalah: the Lilith series, Emanation (1984), Tsim Tsum (1991), Sephiroth (1990), etc. Added to this are a number of Old Testament subjects borrowed from the tradition of history painting: The Departure from Egypt (1984), The Red Sea (1985), Aaron (1985), Seraphim (1984).

Since 1984, when Kiefer settled in the southern French town of Barjac, his work has undergone a significant transformation. The town itself, the surrounding natural scenery, the region's vast open skies, and the culmination of his personal grieving process, have allowed Kiefer to develop new themes such as the exploration of the cosmos – The Orders of Night (1997), Shooting Stars (1998) – but also the cycle dedicated to Robert Fludd, the 17th-century English thinker who upheld the theory that each plant on Earth has its celestial equivalent in the form of a star. Two books appeared – For Robert Fludd (1996) and The Secret Life of Plants (1998) – based on painted photographs and sunflower seeds, a material seen again in the series of large paintings created from prints: Sol Invictus (1995), The Secret Life of Plants (1998) or Cette Obscure Clarté qui Tombe des Etoiles (1996: 'That obscure clarity that falls from the stars', a reference to a line from Corneille).

From his many travels, Kiefer has brought back thousands of photographs, giving rise to the Pyramids series – Remains of the Sun (1997) dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann, and Heaven and Earth (1996) – and an 'Indian' series, based on photographs of brickyards, including The Square (1997)… As if by settling in France, and establishing a new studio, Kiefer had accomplished a kind of ritualised purging of his past. Since 2002, Anselm Kiefer has worked with concrete, creating the Seven Heavenly Palaces (a series of towers installed at Hangar Bicocca on the Pirelli estate in Milan), a series of tributes to Khlebnikov (paintings of the sea, with boats and an array of objects made of lead, 2004-5), a return to the work of Paul Celan with a series of paintings featuring rune motifs (2004-6), and other sculptures.

Kiefer's dialogue with Paul Celan began with his landscape cycle of 1981, dedicated to Celan's poem Fugue of Death. Here, as in the whole of his work, Kiefer illustrates the text not with quotations from poems, but by proposing his own interpretation based on the resonant 'after-echo' of sound, and the persistence of visual stimuli on the retina. Celan's poem allows Kiefer to work through his own mourning process. It allows him to break out of the vicious circle of fascination and repulsion inspired in him by the Third Reich, but also to begin to address the tragedy of the Shoah, Jewish collective memory, and the Kabbalah, while at the same time reappropriating the discarded tatters of the German cultural and artistic tradition. Anselm Kiefer uses direct quotation, but his painterly technique also transposes a certain concept of materiality implicit in Celan's poetic themes: ashes, straw, sand or hair.

One of Kiefer's first painted tributes to Ingeborg Bachmann is the elongated landscape painting Bohemia Lies by the Sea (1995), named for Bachmann's Shakespeare-inspired poem. Strangely, its composition is not unlike Van Gogh's last painting, Wheatfield with Crows, which was itself the inspiration for a poem by Paul Celan. Kiefer was of course familiar with this poem, and the same compositional scheme recurs in many of his landscape paintings. From 1995 onwards, Kiefer corresponded regularly with Bachmann, who was also a close associate of Paul Celan. This poetic discussion, between Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan and Anselm Kiefer – punctuated by digressions, coded retorts, and questioning – lies at the heart of Kiefer's work for the Grand Palais. This unique exhibition contributes to our understanding of what makes Anselm Kiefer such a great artist, of his deep erudition, the thinking behind his associations of ideas, and the processes of displacement and condensation that enable each work to invoke a host of different ideas, and each idea to invoke an array of different works.

Dedicated to the poets Paul Celan (1920-1970) and Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), the paintings and sculptural works are presented in an original setting designed by Anselm Kiefer. For the exhibition at the Grand Palais, Kiefer has created a series of monumental structures (towers and 'houses') each of which houses a number of artworks. For Kiefer, the Grand Palais provides an architectural firmament, a crystal vault that serves to draw down the star-filled night sky, making it an integral part of the installation as a whole.

Anselm Kiefer's installation is a very real physical and intellectual experience, constructed as a kind of dramatised archipelago where the individual and the cosmos, Nature and History, matter and signs define an artistic landscape that is both dense and in a state of constant flux. The first impression is of an architectural creation conceived as a dialogue with the glass and steel of the Grand Palais. Visitors are free to follow their own path around the installation, developing a range of different scenarios, and exploring the wealth of mythological references evoked by Kiefer in his work. Each house is an individual site conceived as an original 'staged' setting for a collection of works.

The seven 'houses' are spectacular structures rising up to 12 metres in height, with names evoking a wealth of emotional, artistic and intellectual resonances: Sternenfall ('Falling Stars'), Geheimnis der Farne ('The Secret of the Ferns'), The Milky Way, Aperiatur Terra, Journey to the End of the Night, Nebelland ('Land of Fog') Palm Sunday. Among other things, the houses contain vast paintings mixing straw, branches, sunflowers, ferns, palm fronds etc., a lead book-case, an immense palm tree lying across the floor etc. Two towers complete the installation, including one which has toppled over, and a second conceived as a kind of monumental sculpture, marking the contrast between the ethereal, finely-honed architecture of the Grand Palais and the raw, massive, even ruinous character of Kiefer's works.

Anselm Kiefer combines the power of painting with the spirit of poetry to create a captivating 'total' experience in homage to two major figures of world literature: Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann – a literary dimension which further heightens the paintings' powerful visual and emotional charge, and opens the way to a world of further references and quotations.

Press preview 29 May 2007 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Public preview 29 May 2007 from 9 p.m.

Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris
Opening hours: Daily, except Tuesday; Monday, Wednesday: 10a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday: Noon to midnight.
Admission: Standard 4 euros; Concessions 2 euros

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