15/06/17 - With quotes from the Bible as starting point, German artist Anselm Kiefer (1945) created a series of artworks which renders palpable the destruction of human life, while the divine lingers on. 

Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love), by Anselm Kiefer (2017)

Anselm Kiefer is currently exhibiting at the Gagosian Gallery a never-ending quantity of watercolors, installations and large textured canvases. Among the highlights are the artist's own sketchbooks, displayed in glass cabinets, as if they were antique or fragile objects. This installation, which occupies an entire room, reveal, in the pages of those notebooks, images of feminine nudes of intense erotic content. This artist's books, according to Kiefer, evoque the fragility of the sacred and spiritual through the feminine figure. The bodies remind us of Auguste Rodin's sculptures or Michelangelo's drawings, in which the figure looks as if about the get out of the material that contains her.

Installation view

The textured artworks portray romantic landscapes throughout the seasons of the year. In some of them we see the outline of the artist's palette. Over the traditional landscape of trees and lakes, we perceive a circular shape, but only when seen up close we realize it's his palette. In other paintings, far in the background he included also a sketch of the artist's studio.

Gagosian Gallery, New York

des Malers Atelier (The Painter’s Studio), by Anselm Kiefer (2016)

Ignis sacer, by Anselm Kiefer (2016)

Kiefer was born little after WWII in a devastated Germany. Even today his artworks reflect sadness and distress, apart from an intense need for redemption. Death and life are constant subjects, as also the Cosmos and the Universe. Kiefer is an artist who attached himself to traditional mediums to communicate pure feeling.