Anselm Kiefer - Walhalla - White Cube

A huge scale led based exploration into Kiefer's interpretation of the mythological world of 'Walhalla'. Whilst I found the scale to be impressive, I felt a lot of the work was scattered and not as well curated as his Royal Academy exhibition the previous year. 

From the site: White Cube presented an exhibition by Anselm Kiefer featuring large-scale installation, sculpture and painting. Titled ‘Walhalla’, the exhibition referred to the mythical place in Norse mythology, a paradise for those slain in battle, as well as to the Walhalla neo-classical monument, built by Ludwig I King of Bavaria in 1842 to honour heroic figures in German history.

In his latest paintings, Kiefer employs a range of media – oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac and clay – to emphasise the space of painting as a threshold into a mythic, imaginative realm. Here, a series of high towers are set amid desolate landscapes, their stacked forms exploding and dissolving into clouds of deep black or caustic blue smoke. A familiar motif in the artist’s work, the towers are based on his own sculptures made from rough concrete casts of shipping containers, including the brutalist-style towers of Jericho made for the set of In the Beginning staged at Opéra Bastille in Paris in 2009. In one such painting, Kiefer depicts the towers up-close, as if the viewer has found themselves in the ruins of some ancient city. In another work, which consists of three panels, flights of steps leading up to each tower reference the neo-classical, imposing architecture of Walhalla. Here, however, rather than the symbolic bastion of power that Walhalla aims to evoke, they are flat and two-dimensional, overlaid and set at impossible angles under the expanse of a meridian blue sky. In other pictures, which echo the landscapes of Van Gogh, the paintings are divided by a rough track, receding as far as the eye can see and often encrusted with layers of paint and deposited with a bitumen-like matter.

Nonetheless, I did find these impressive, and particularly enjoyed the small bursts of bright blue that aided the character and depth of the paintings. As well as this, he does a great job in transforming the usually isolating white walls of the gallery space, into this dystopian nightmarish led based installation. His use of mix media and dedication to the emotive responses of art (in exposing himself to the high risk of led poisoning) does merit credit in his ability to transform an environment and heighten the emotive responses of his audience.