Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Anselm Kiefer
German; 20th-century, 21st-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum (Exhibition: Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea)
51%
Brennstäbe (Fuel Rods). 1984-87. Oil, acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas with ceramic, iron, copper wire, straw, and lead
Kiefer is better the less his images try to be representational. His best works are the unabashed sculptural paintings, rather the hybrid picture-sculptures like this. Brennstäbe suffers quite a bit for being a landscape; this makes its assemblage elements (actual fuel rods affixed to the surface; a Schnabel-esque dish) seem pat. It's better when it's expressing anxiety over the literal/pictorial problem it sets up (upper right quadrant), worse when it's behaving blithely (extreme peeling across the whole lower third). The main issue is that Kiefer seems to have set up a system where he can call on sculpture to explain away bad painting, and call on painting to apologize for bad sculpture. It's a fundamentally squirrelly approach. (TFS, 2025)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum (Exhibition: Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea)
40%
Orithyia. 2024. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, and charcoal on canvas
Kiefer's late, gigantic paintings are smug. They take it as their task to resolve the tension, to suture the divide, between images and the material stuff through which images are conveyed for experience. They want, in a word, to be both and at once presences and illusions — literal and figurative — which is why they're so full of gold leaf: medieval icons didn't deal with any knowledge of themselves as pictures. This all is smug because it's not just Kiefer, but all of modern painting that desires such oneness, and Kiefer's late paintings comport themselves as if they're in possession of some sort of mystical solution to the problem. In actuality, their excrescent surfaces are like complex apologies for the treacly figures they contain; their colors are those of any gift store gilder; their monumentality is an end, not a means. (TFS, 2025)