Sunday, 12 October 2014

Anselm Kiefer

Retrospective at Royal Academy
What struck me most was his ability to 'hold it all together' - to have immense complexity playing itself out across a canvas, every square centimetre rich in detail, but all resolved into a working whole.

The power of work in vitrines - the extra depth of field, the focus

Also the use of text:

  • the casual scrawling across a painting of words, usually a line of poetry, but lost on the viewer unless they understand German and are familiar with its literature
  • incorporation of text e.g. into the furrows of Black Flakes.
  • the image of the lead book (lead the most mutable of the metals)
  • in The Rhine the partial obscuring of text, whitewashing, collaging

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