Two articles on Anselm Kiefer

Schama, Simon. Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother. London: Vintage, 2011.

page 278
Anselm Kiefer
Guardian, 20 January 2007

Schama introduces this article by letting us know Kiefer tackles the big subjects, "the stuff that matters".

He is writing about Kiefer's show Aperiatur Terra at White Cube in London. Schama lightly states that Kiefer appears to have turned gardener, with paintings such as Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum (2006) shown below. But he's not gardening gently.

This work is thick with paint, which Schama describes as volcanic material. The flower heads are bright and hopeful, but human intervention is shown by the track to the horizon, and the earth is a greenish-black paint, the "corrupted hues of chemical pollution" as Schama describes. Kiefer incorporates into his paintings organic and inorganic matter such as straw, hay, twigs.

Schama tells us that the bright poppies could be soldiers, or their fiery graves, or combat flares. There is no peaceful gardening here, only "dirty fields of death".

Schama concludes with "Kiefer's work happens to engage with almost everything that weighs upon us in our tortured age - the fate of the earth, the closeness of calamity, the desperate possibility of regeneration amid the charred and blasted ruins."

page 284
In Mesopotamia: Anselm Kiefer

Catalogue essay for Karfunkelfee and The Fertile Crescent
White Cube, 2009

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