GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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Wet Mud
JAN WOOLF wallows in the historical mulch of post WW2 West Germany, and the resistant, challenging sense made of it by Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer, Wer jetzt kein Haus hat (Whoever has no House now), 2023
[Georges Poncet]
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
Anselm Kiefer, Early Works
Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford
THE exhibition of Anselm Kiefer’s Early Works at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is profound and timely.
Like all exhibitions of this internationally renowned artist, it begins with recent pieces. Soon to be 80 years old, we start with Autumn (1973-74), a large-scale painting of cool greys and warm browns with gold leaves — wandering in the forest of his years. Forest (Wald) lies in the mythology in many cultures — early Hinduism with its renunciates going into the forest to meditate until they find the “Absolute.” In the dark and twisted forests of northern Europe, where writers like the Grimm Brothers worked their terrifying stories, the tall tree soldiers of Nazi mythology are marching as one.
Autumn precedes his early and controversial work; Occupations, a series of actions where he dons his father’s Wehrmacht greatcoat and gives the banned straight right hand salute in significant European places. Fur Jean Genet (1969) is one of these artist’s books
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