Daily Mail

The artist who makes gloomy GLORIOUS!

As the provocateu­r Anselm Kiefer’s vast artworks go on show in London...

- By Jane Fryer

ANSELM KIEFER has never been the sort to shy away from big ideas, complex issues or dark and difficult projects on a titanic scale.

Over the past six decades his art has embraced everything from German mythology to astronomy; maths to comparativ­e religion; politics to war. And all the while, become bigger. And bigger. And bigger.

When New York’s MoMA exhibited his work in 1988, the gallery walls had to be specially reinforced to support the weight of his vast, often leadcovere­d canvases.

But even with all this in mind, his current show at Jay Jopling’s White Cube gallery in London’s Bermondsey is quite an undertakin­g. And not just for 74-year-old Kiefer who must have wrestled with mountains of old cabling, charred sticks, gallons of paint and an alarming number of rusty axes to produce it.

Entitled, somewhat grandly, Superstrin­gs, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot, it brings together all his existing interests and draws on the scientific concept known as string theory. That’s what the guide says, anyway. The scale and gloom are astonishin­g. No wonder ‘portentous’ is a word that pops up time and again in critics’ reviews of his work.

The centre of the gallery feels like a subterrane­an tunnel lined with 30 dark vitrines (large glass and lead display cases) filled with swirly painted cables and tubing, bits of dried fern, a couple of axes and scrawled mathematic­al equations.

But the vitrines are tiny compared to the pictures in the galleries. Each is as big as a decent- sized sitting room — looming, doom- laden and festooned with charred sticks, singed straw and burnt books.

And that’s before you include whole string-theory angle. This is a tremendous­ly complicate­d branch of particle physics based around the idea that all matter in the universe is connected — a possible ‘theory of everything’. It’s quite a lot to take in, which is exactly how Kiefer likes it.

The twice-divorced artist’s first major exhibition, in 1969, was a series of jaw-droppingly provocativ­e photograph­s of him dressed in a Nazi uniform and performing mock salutes at monuments and tourist sites across Europe. He wanted to highlight the shame of postwar Germany but the reaction from critics was visceral.

He was born in 1945, in the cellar of the family home in southern Germany during an air raid. ‘Ruins are beautiful,’ he said, adding that his favourite film is footage of planes filming the devastatio­n in Germany after the war.

After the ‘Nazi’ stunt, his career floundered. ‘Everyone was against my work,’ he said. ‘Of course, they later turned in my favour, but I needed a high degree of confidence to continue.’

THAT has never been a problem for him. When he moved his workshop to a warehouse near Paris a few years ago, he left his finished pieces behind to be ‘ taken over by nature’. But it still took 100 lorries to transport the works to a warehouse on the outskirts of the French capital.

Owing to his obsession with using different media, including straw, shellac, fern, mud, paint, gold lacquer, axes and scythes, many finished pieces have what galleries call ‘issues with stability’. In plain language, that means they tend to decay and fall apart.

All the works at White Cube are for sale, at around £1 million each. My advice would be to come to drink in the astonishin­g misery of it all — and then head home for cup of tea and a bit more revision into string theory.

Because if you have a clue what any of it means after an hour or so looking at this remarkable art, you are a lot cleverer than me.

 ??  ?? Challengin­g: Artwork String-Theorie by Anselm Kiefer, right
Challengin­g: Artwork String-Theorie by Anselm Kiefer, right
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