Rubble represents not only an end, but also a beginning. In reality, the so-called “Stunde Null” (zero hour) never existed. Rubble is like the blossom of a plant; it is the radiant highpoint of an incessant metabolism, the beginning of a rebirth. And the longer we can put off refilling empty spaces, the more fully and intensively we can produce a past that proceeds with the future as if reflected in a mirror. The “Stunde Null” does not exist. Emptiness bares its opposite within itself.
—Anselm Kiefer
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture and photo-collages by Anselm Kiefer.
For the oval gallery, Kiefer has created a group of eight sculptures that evoke some of the central themes in his work deriving from his assiduous study of poetry, mythology, and cultural history. Each of the sculptures incorporates irregular stacks of massive books made from lead. Among them are Paete, non dolet (It does not hurt), which alludes to the ancient Roman myth of Arria and Paetus; Bilderstreit, which relates to the famous historical controversy over the use of religious imagery in the Byzantine Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries, recast by Kiefer to represent his premise that “spiritual things such as art are always menaced by real physical power”; and Sternenfall (Falling Stars), a scattering of glass shards inscribed with numbers corresponding to stars in the charted galaxy. Another pervasive theme here, and in Kiefer’s oeuvre in general, is great ships and sea vessels. Verunglückte Hoffnung is directly inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s dark masterpiece, The Wreck of the Hope, a tectonic depiction of a shipwreck in the Arctic Ocean that reached beyond documentary to suggest an allegory of human aspiration crushed by nature’s immense and glacial indifference.
In addition to the sculptures are eight unusually large vertical collages based on photographs of Kiefer’s The Seven Heavenly Palaces (2005), a series of monumental towers cast from concrete and lead intended to symbolize the mystical experience of the ascent through the seven levels of spirituality. The untitled collages treat the theme of Ararat, the mountain on which Noah’s Ark came to rest when the floodwaters receded.
Kiefer’s monumental archive of human memory gives overt material presence to a broad range of cultural myths and metaphors, from the Old and New Testaments to the Kabbalah, from ancient Roman history to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. By constructing elaborate scenographies that cross the boundaries of art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history; the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos; and the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual amid the ongoing destruction of the world.
