Anselm Kiefer. Alicia Chillida

The painting of monumental character is the core of the exhibition, with the theme of brick constructions, paintings with long poetic titles: Nur mit Wind, mit Zeit und mit Klang (Only with Wind, Time and Silence), 1998; Das Geviert (Block), 1997; Der Sand aus dem Urnen (The Sand of the Urns), 1997; Wach im Zigeunerlager und Wach im Wüstenzelt (Awake in the Gypsy Camp, Awake in the Desert Tent), 1997.

Like many of Kiefer's other works, they seem to belong to a strange region and to have been born in a distant time, according to critic Heiner Bastian. They refer to that "old background of symbolic metamorphoses that in other times built a unity, a promise that places us beyond alienation...".

Anselm Kiefer has considered what it means to be a 20th century avant-garde artist. By the ironic and provocative nature of his work, it is evident that he accepts and embraces the notion of the modern artist who stands outside of society, questioning its history, its norms, its taboos, its myths and its ideas about art. Because of these concerns he has produced a body of work with Germanic themes, values and symbols. His insistence on opening emotional wounds and emphasizing the losses of culture is a way to explore his own heritage and identity (Aschenblumen / Ash Flower, 1997).

The paintings are accompanied by a series of twenty books, which occupy a privileged place in the artist's creative universe. The artist's use of photography as a personal narrative and as a language that develops in parallel to his paintings demonstrates the degree to which his thinking has derived from the conceptual movement and how he remains attached to it.

We can consider Kiefer's work as an attempt to synthesize the great artistic traditions of the near and distant past, and also an attempt to overcome them. The artist has used the conventions of History Painting, but unlike traditional historical painters, he brings together different points of view and offers contradictory interpretations with the characteristic magnificence of the tradition.

The approach to Landscape Painting is also deeply meditated. The obsession with nature as a setting for expressing deep feelings (Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles / This dark clarity falling from the stars 1997) and analyze the myths and traditions of antiquity as a method to face the present and the future

The exhibition also includes two specific references to his sculptural work. Behemoth1987-98, a large room, generated as a social and individual reaction to an event of a political nature; and the installation 20 Jahre Eisamkeit (20 years of Solitude), 1971-91, whose base is the lead from the Cologne Cathedral, a material used insistently by Kiefer due to its physical and symbolic qualities in relation to its transformative powers.

Nevertheless, the author retains a sense of idealism and spirituality through a hermetic approach to themes and symbols through the ages, such as the pyramid in Nebelland hab ich gesehen, Nebelherz hab'ch gegessen (I have seen the Land of the Mist, the Heart of the Mist I have already eaten), 1997.

Kiefer produces canvases of considerable pictorial complexity with great visual tension between two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space. These tensions are representative of Kiefer's attempt to unite the scale and visual richness of Abstract Expressionism with meaningful subject matter. Kiefer's paintings are epic elegies to the human condition, pulsating with deep, heartfelt emotion, complex thematic subtlety and extraordinary surface agitation.