25. ANSELM KIEFER - A SPACE BETWEEN EXORCISM AND PRAYER.
Anselm Kiefer - Finnegans Wake, White Cube - LONDON.
Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.
Piled, rusted supermarket trollies - as if resurrected from the depths of rivers, where their weighted surrender was executed through nocturnal intoxication - are now repositioned in Kiefers' sober no-mans-land of reawakening. Where bouquets of pettleless sunflowers sprout, their seedheads drowned in charcoal paint, their monitoring faces desperately looking in every direction with every gasping breath.
An abandoned multi-wheel-chair demands attention, a crumpled chariot extraordinarily views as if still in motion - and yet, as with everything in Anselms' world - is paused - or somehow in the slow motion of changing states, so slow its kinetic shift is undetectable through human eyes - but atmospherically sensed.
A library of leaden books, open and abandoned on a concrete floor - their poisonous contents oxidised to methyl orange, toxic tarnished leaves blackened with mold.
Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.
Uncoiled rusted barbed wire sprawls across a floor amassed with rubble, not from a fallen ceiling but installed and recreated as if confiscated - awaiting further analysis - a violation dismantled, an overwhelming tension disseminated.
Naked bulbs drip tentatively - like glistening pearls of sweat - exhausted with adrenaline.
Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.
Into the corridors of the Kiefers' subconscious, to stare in fascination at countless vitrines whose contents are poetic metaphors and physical feelings preserved - with the clagging paints, plaster, and vandyke washes - dry in translucent layers.
Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.
Each artifact bares the artist's soul and touch - categorised with charcoal scribbled annotation - precisely stretching with lucid handwritten conviction.
Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.
The shelves of this lost-and-found depot, store the codes of Anselm Kiefer's idiom - the sheaves of a summer's field, the chipped maquettes of the artist's corrugated architectural towers, the dried ferns and flowers, and seed heads - poised and tentative. The empty nests, rusted mechanisms and broken statues, feather-tipped scales, paper white shirts, and a mass of dented buckets - midas gold - glimmering in the shadows.
Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.
The synaptic sparks of one man's mind seem to charge each item with a humm of concentration - where persistent unrelenting recalls meet discordant unravellings.
All these moments caught in time and place, like trapped butterflies - still flickering with life - tender memories, nostalgic, pensive and painful, hysterical and vulnerable, squirreled away in the depths of a mind to be extracted to the surface like an exorcism or a prayer.
Image: Arnan Wang for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.
Image: Anselm Kiefer - courtesy of White Cube 2023.
Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.
Anselm Kiefer - Finnegans Wake - Until 20 August 2023 - White Cube - London. Special Thanks: Arnan Wang, Tom Gu, and Isabelle Cook at White Cube.