ANSELM KIEFER
Gagosian is pleased to announce Anselm Kiefer’s debut solo exhibition in Greece. It features new and recent paintings, sculpture, and photography.
June 21 - August 24, 2024
Kiefer’s landscapes convey poetic responses to myth, history, and the natural world, evoking themes of creation, metamorphosis, and the cyclical nature of existence. These works are united by the artist’s juxtaposition of the luminosity of gold with the visual and symbolic resonance of other mediums including oil and acrylic paint, shellac, straw, and fabric.
Kiefer contrasts the materials’ varying tonalities and textures to impart the sublimity of nature and the weight of history. He alludes to gold’s allegorical significance by making reference to the metal’s use in sacred icons and ancient legends, its alchemical symbolism in relation to lead (another key material in his practice), and the ideal of a “golden age.”
Two paintings from 2023 titled Danaë interpret a myth that has inspired artists from Titian and Rembrandt to Gustav Klimt. The mythological figure of Danaë was imprisoned by her father, King Acrisius of Argos, in response to a prophecy that her son would kill him. Zeus circumvented her prison walls by transforming himself into a shower of gold, leading to the conception of Perseus.
Spes Vana (Empty hope) (2021) is a photograph printed on a gilded panel of a sculpture of a sunken naval ship taken at Kiefer’s studio in France. Reminiscent of the shipwreck painted by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich in his sublime arctic scene Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice, 1823–24), this work’s striking golden ground reflects Kiefer’s experimental approach to photography.
Nehebkau (1993–2023) is titled after an ancient Egyptian deity who took the form of a snake with human legs and served as a guardian of the underworld and binder of the ka, or vital essence of the soul. Inscribing hieroglyphics in the painting’s upper register, Kiefer incorporates straw, terra-cotta, gold leaf, the sediment of a copper solution that has undergone electrolysis, and paint, juxtaposing material presence and motifs of transcendence.
A sculpture housed in a vitrine, Ignis sacer (2014) contains scattered flakes of gold that read as a foreign substance among stalks of wheat. In addition to suggesting the sacred connotations of gold, the gold leaf symbolizes Ignis sacer (holy fire) or ergotism, a disease spread by a fungus that contaminates grain and causes mania, hallucinations, and death.