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22/10/2010

Anselm Kiefer

KMSKA The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Antwerp

curator: Walter Smerling, Director of MKM Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg
in collaboration with: 'Die Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur e.V. Bonn'

This autumn, three major museum partners – Antwerp City Museums (1), KMSKA and M HKA – are joining forces to organise a unique exhibition of work by the prominent contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer (1945).

This is the first major Anselm Kiefer exhibition to be staged in Antwerp. It showcases selected works from 1980 to the present day. The pieces on display are part of the collection of the Grothe family, who have been passionately collecting German contemporary art since the 1970s. The selection is by curator Walter Smerling, the president of Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur in Bonn, Germany.

The work shown is representative of some of Kiefer’s most familiar themes, including memories of German history, the Holocaust and other devastating consequences of the Second World War.

According to art critic and essayist Paul Depondt, Kiefer’s approach to history focuses not on ‘facts’ or ‘trivia’, but rather on ‘atmosphere’, thereby creating a realm of reflection and emotion that at once evokes the great myths and the recent past. He regards Kiefer as the archivist of war-stricken landscapes.

Kiefer is a teller of stories. His work is a visual Gesamtkunstwerk, an epic and poetic total experience. His compositions are ‘arranged’ theatrical spaces for histories to unfold.

Each of these grand creations is characteristic of the artistic language of Kiefer. Using basic materials such as ash, earth, iron and wood, he breathes life into the historical memory.

Throughout his oeuvre, Kiefer uses symbolically loaded imagery: the fire of creation and destruction, the labyrinthine forest, the water of the Flood and the origin of life, the earth that brings forth and takes back.
He is an alchemist and mythographer who literally moulds the ancient epos into compositions of lead and paint.

But the exhibition also features work that reveals Kiefer’s keen interest in religion, mythology and literature.
As the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp is preparing for major renovation work and is temporarily suspending the display of its permanent collection, the vacated museum building provides the ideal setting for this exhibition of Kiefer’s monumental work, which opens on 23 October 2010.

Last year, Antwerp City Museums, KMSKA and M HKA jointly organised an exhibition in Shanghai and Singapore entitled ‘A Story of the Image’. It was the start of a structural partnership that allows the museums to explore synergies between their respective exhibition programmes and to develop a joint communication strategy. By joining forces in this way, they are able to fill lacunas in the current exhibition offering and present shows in Antwerp that would be difficult or impossible to stage by any one of the partners individually. Thanks to this novel approach, exhibitions that the Flemish public could previously only admire abroad will soon be on display in Antwerp.

The next joint projects will take place in the spring of 2011. The empty KMSKA building will then provide a fitting backdrop for an exhibition entitled ‘Museums of the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings’. The three partners will also join forces in the inaugural temporary exhibition at the brand-new MAS (Museum aan de Stroom), which will feature some seventy paintings from the KMSKA collections as well as showpieces from M HKA and the Print Room of Museum Plantijn-Moretus.

(1) Antwerp City Museums is a conglomerate of all municipal museums of the City of Antwerp. It includes Museum Plantin-Moretus | Print Room, Middelheim Museum, MAS | Museum aan de Stroom, Red Star Line Museum, House of Literature, Museum Mayer van den Bergh, and the Rubens House.

For further information, please contact:
Nadine Plehiers, Persdienst Musea en Erfgoed Antwerpen tel +32 3 2923614, gsm +32 3 492 915238, nadine.plehiers@stad.antwerpen.be

Press contact
Véronique Van Passel Plaatsnijdersstraat 2 2000 Antwerp T +32 (0)3 2420438 veronique.vanpassel@kmska.be

KMSKA Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp)
Plaatsnijdersstraat 2 B-2000 Antwerp
Hours:
Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 10am to 5pm and on Sundays from 10am to 6pm
closed on Mondays and on 25 December 2010 as well as 1 and 2 January 2011
Admission:
€ 6
€ 4: residents of Antwerp, students, groups of 15+ persons
€ 1: 19-25 years
Free: under-19s and over-65s, city guides, disabled persons and carers, school groups accompanied by teachers, VMV and ICOM members, holders of Klasse teacher or student pass, unemployed persons, Friends of KMSKA, M HKA or Antwerp City Museums The admission fee covers the Anselm Kiefer exhibition only.

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