Anselm Kiefer Finnegan’s wake - my personal best exhibition of 2023
Reflecting on the art that I have experienced in 2023, the one that really stands out was Anselm Kiefer’s Finnegan’s Wake, exhibited at White Cube in London this past summer. Kiefer has taken inspiration from Joyce’s novel of the same name (considered to be one of the most difficult works of fiction) to create monumental installations in the gallery’s 58,000 sqft space. This novel has both perplexed and fascinated Kiefer and he has repeatedly come back to it’s dense text over the years.
Kiefer is considered one of the most important artists of our time and has been making art for the past 40 years, often commenting on war, politics and religion. He was born in Germany in 1945, just as World War II was concluding. On the night of his birth, his home was bombed. Luckily his parents and him were in the hospital so they all survived. Kiefer grow up in a country that was destroyed by war but he made the most of the materials at hand and not having toys to play with, played with bricks and rubble as a child. In the exhibition, you can see how his childhood has informed his art.
The lobby of White cube gallery is, as expected stark white with white fluorescent lighting. To set the sombre tone of the exhibition, a phrase from the book ‘Here Comes Everybody…’, is written simply on the wall in cursive using charcoal, with an attributions to Joyce, devoid of any fanfare that is usually accompanied with an exhibition of this scale and stature (Fig 1). Throughout the show, Kiefer has used text from the novel on walls and in paintings to create a space as his response to the book, which he says he has been been coming back to over and over again.
The entrance is marked by vertically hung plastic sheets with printed images that resemble movie reels from a bygone era. As you enter the corridor, it takes a minute for your eyes to get accustomed to the dimly lit space with a single row of exposed light bulbs leading down the long narrow space. Both sides of the corridor are lined with industrial metal shelves creating a sense of instability, heightened by a metal mesh cover over the ceiling. Each shelf contains randomly placed items like discarded plaster moulds, dried foliage in vitrines, painters drop cloths, models of buildings and discarded parts of bicycles. Interspersed between the shelves are text from the novel. You get a sense that you have entered a warehouse, a space that is not to be witnessed by the public and unease sets in as you continue on.
The exhibition comprises of four, well-lit rooms. The first room contains shelves with more objects placed on them, one is a large vitrine with a weighing scale that compares the weight a feather to a heart (illustrating the ancient Egyptian belief in judgment after death – “If your heart is heavier than a feather you go to hell!” as told in an article in the Guardian to Jonathan Jones.). Neatly hung in another vitrine are white dresses. The ‘empty dress’ is a motif that Kiefer has used to represent different types of female presence mainly from religious books.
The other two rooms are large and have massive paintings on the walls (one of the largest ones ‘And oil paint use a pumme’ measures 149 5/8 x 448 13/16 in.) of dark landscapes with destitute people. When you stand in front of one of these large paintings, you are immersed in an expansive, barron landscape with a horizon further away, which also seems stark. The mood is made bleaker by piles of rubble, barbed wire, dried flowers and mangled metal objects like shopping carts, as if you have entered the aftermath of a war zone. Kiefer uses natural materials like pigment, straw, clay, wire, sand, glass, woodcuts, ceramics, dried flowers for this installations, and does not resort to any colored paints or pigment, surrounding the viewer with a restraint palette of shades of greys, black and browns. He creates a heavily worked on surface that is layered with these natural materials and when the painting is complete, his last act is to hack at it with a metal object, creating fissures on the thick surface. His paintings transform over time as bits of it fall or materials change even during an exhibition, giving the paintings a life of their own.
The last room brings together two of Kiefer fascinations of alchemy and books. It is an homage to books (again referencing the inspiration for this exhibition) and is uplifting. A large collection of metal books with their pages open are piled in the center of the room and have been transformed using lead, showing varying degree of beautiful green patina and grays. Books have remained central to his practice since the mid 1970s and believes that it is a sign of peoples need to connect and communicate across space and time. During this time, he also discovered lead, the material used to transform metal into gold. Kiefer explains about alchemy that “it wasn’t just a materialistic idea, it was a spiritual one: to transform matter into a higher spiritual state.” It is this transformative property of lead that he has explored over the years, despite being warned of its dangers. He says “lead and me, it’s one thing”. The landscape paintings in this room are composed of a golden sky made from gold leaf and a verdant, dense landscape. One painting is titled Liffey, which is a river in Ireland and referenced in the novel.
Finishing the exhibition with this room was uplifting but walking through the entire space, was a very slow and reflective experience. Confronted by the scale of the works, the starkness of the color palette of the objects and trying to make sense of the disorder, was a very unsettling feeling. It brought up many questions regarding how the viewer would feel if they were to be surrounded by destruction and decay. However, when you took the time to look at individual objects in the installations, there is beauty in them and were created meticulously. This exhibition allowed for introspection as a response to the art in the space.
This was not an easy show to visit and I went twice during my visit to London. Having seen images and videos of Kiefer’s works does not prepare one or do justice to this absolutely great artist’s works*. Kiefer’s response to Joyce’s novel written in 1939, during a time of turmoil just before WWII, is very apt for the current political climate where conflict and war are being waged around the world. This truly was the best exhibition in 2023 that I have witnessed for invoking such a strong response in me.
*Credit must also be given to his team of assistants at his 200-acre studio in Barjac, France who enable such monumental works to be created.