Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer is a German contemporary artist. He is a nineteenth-century contemporary artist. He was born in 1945. He is a painter, sculpture and installation artist. He accomplishes the concept of melancholia in his artworks. He examines within his past. In his works, he works in mixed media. He uses straw, ash, clay, lead, broken glass, dried flowers, plants, shellac, oil paint and organic materials. He creates surfaces of thick layers of impasto. He works with ideas from his past. He develops themes of the german history and the horror of the holocaust. He works with larger scales. He utilises materials that are temporary and fragile. He was influenced, by the composer Richard Wagner. He has created paintings, watercolours, woodcuts and books. He uses the Neo-Expressionism art movement in-depth. He works with memory of landscape and place. He shows the characteristics of textures in his works. He looks at myths, histories and memories. He has ascribed the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. He uses a variety of colours and monochromatic effects. In Germany, he expanded his distribution of the European battle of World War II. He declares that art may not be clear as his works to distribute among the past, the present, the future in this complex world. He has additionally examined studying the history of mythology. He conducted his artistic expression within the use of physical materiality. He visioned the complexity. He investigates his concepts in-depth with the contexts and histories of tactility. He had a variety of subject matters which were from his diverse sources of Teutonic mythologies, the historic, the alchemist and the nature of belief. I saw his work displayed at the White Cube Gallery at Bermondsey. He tries to connect everything from the missing letters, string theory, the Norns and the Gordian knot. I visited on Saturday 11th January 2020. The exhibition was titled Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot. The first image above on the left is an installation shot. It contained 30 painting vitrines. They were all displayed in glass frames as mixed media in steel. The dimensions were 382 x 192 x 35cm. As I entered the White Cube Gallery, the effectiveness of space and scale overwhelmed me. The second image above on the right is a close-up installation shot. When I was gazing at the vitrine paintings; I felt overwhelmed and visioned; how I could make my overwhelming works. The vitrine paintings; make me think how I felt during; the past that created the overwhelmed emotion. During my past this work connects me feeling overwhelmed, all tightened up by my surroundings of things; how I felt isolated as an individual. It feels claustrophobic, everything is tight and creates a sense of isolation; that I encountered during my childhood; where I felt melancholic. For my future exhibitions, I will consider trying out a bigger scale and use space more precisely. From the third image, it shows the depth of the textures he uses from the materials he uses. This reminds, of the memories I had during; my emotional past. The book is dominant against his work and works well in depth. From looking at this book, this has made me have thoughts on having ideas. In the future practice, I would explore into creating a mixed media collage book including, all the emotional memories I had.