May 5 to September 1 (extended), 2017
522 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, gagosian.com

Within the high walls of a cloistered garden, a young man falls in love with a rose, but seeking every possible avenue through which to attain his affection, it becomes increasingly clear he can never have it without destroying that aspect of it which he loves. With the general plot line of the original “Romance of the Rose” (1230 CE) in our minds, and its universal ramifications for all human relationships, we can follow the path that Anselm Kiefer weaves in his newest exhibition, “Transition from Cool to Warm,” rich with themes of sexuality, eroticism, femininity and longing. Though bookended with several massive paintings, the heart of the exhibition comprises watercolors and books. The exhibition has also been, to extend the metaphor, bookmarked by two events: an interview with Paul Holdengräber at The New York Public Library and an intimate demonstration of the plaster-soaked-cardboard books taken out of their vitrines at the gallery. These extra-curricular activities allowed the viewer into Kiefer’s thorny garden, and explicated a profound transition of the artist/author from his pulpit of philosopher and historian to a much more earthy place, looking up at the stars with the rest of us.

The exhibition has been laid out along the plan of a basilica, with a pair of rooms as aisles on either side of a main nave. The inner sanctum of the gallery contains a presentation of Kiefer’s newest one-off art books—hybrid objects that ensnare a dizzying number of references: to Wagner and Nordic mythology, Abrahamic traditions, Rodin, Picasso and the modern conception of data storage and presentation. On the evening of June 22nd, several of the books were removed from their vitrines and presented up-close. Vitrines have always served Kiefer well, and the chunky archaic tomes were accessible to the viewer as splayed hydra-like assemblages within their glass cases. Out of the cases though, and with their heavy encrusted leaves turned by two preparators, the static objects became storytellers. When reading, flipping a page is usually not such a big deal, though the term “page-turner” does still resonate; but when presented with Kiefer’s oversize monolithic works, the viewer is forced to digest the imagery of the page; a marbleized background overlaid with a languorous female figure traced in fragile graphite lines and then fluidly enlivened with watercolor in pink, beige, ochre, or any iteration of a flesh tone imaginable. With each turn the manuscript groans and the balance of weight shifts as one image recedes into shadow and another goddess or nymph appears. The majority of the books cover the subject of “Klingsor’s Garden,” 33 volumes in all, referencing the garden of women/flowers who attempt to seduce the hero in Wagner’s opera Parsifal. In contrast to the mythological is the historical “Jules Michelet: les Reines de France” (2013). Particularly edifying was the presentation of Keifer’s original sketchbook, “Erotik im Fernen Osten oder Transition from Cool to Warm” from the mid-1970’s. This fragile and deeply personal narrative placed the artist’s newest pieces in context. The female imagery has existed in Kiefer’s cosmology as a hot, diaphanous and perhaps uncomfortable balance to the epic literature and historical landscapes that have comprised his main corpus.

The day before the opening of the exhibition Kiefer was interviewed at the New York Public Library. Kiefer’s interlocutor, Paul Holdengräber, was able to expertly unpack much of the symbolism that forms a sturdy foundation for the current work. The discussion focused on the immediacy of the work in the life of the artist: Kiefer was brought up in a house in ruins, as it was bombed on the night his mother rushed to the hospital to give birth to him (or so the story goes), so the destructive propensities of history and the devastation in his work is from direct observation and experience. This was heightened in the discussion by Holdengräber’s bold decision to frankly address Kiefer’s “Occupations” series, the artist’s powerful and equivocal assessment of the war. On the humorous side, a slide of the artist dressed as a Cardinal underlined the fact that as a youth he longed to enter the Catholic Church and rise up the ranks of sacred hierarchy but was thwarted by the blunt assertion that no German could be pope. These revelations of juicy subtexts aid immeasurably in the understanding of the work, and even hint at the angle at which Kiefer approaches the erotic.

Unlike Picasso, the sexual imagery of whose late work emerges from his own lascivious fantasies, Kiefer’s vision is predicated on the works of his poet friend Jean-Noël Vuarnet, whose “Extases Féminines” (Paris, 1980) described the experiences of such personages as Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena. (Kiefer’s series of watercolors inspired by Vuarnet is on view.) Kiefer immediately builds a religious and numinous subtext into his eroticism, much as Wagner does with his field of seductive flower girls crossed with Christian iconography in Parsifal, and this accounts for the flowers as well as the Christian symbolism mixed together in the watercolors. The paintings which serve as something of a preface and epilogue to the main, bookish, body of the exhibition also engage the darker side of Kiefer’s Catholicism: Ohne title (untitled) 2017 and Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love) (2017) prominently feature lead torturously peeling off the surface of the canvas, an aesthetic choice that the artist in his Public Library discussion paralleled to the flaying of St. Bartholomew, while Schlange (snake) (2017) is a large vertical canvas crowned with a re-bar grate, a recreation of a grill on which to roast any number of saintly individuals. While that is decidedly hot, the oscillation between cool and warm is very perceptible in the artist’s handling of intense human emotions such as faith, lust, love and loss. Rather than cast himself into the flames, he prefers to ponder such issues within the walled garden he has built out of plaster volumes.

The post Romancing the Rose: Anselm Kiefer’s Eroticism at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.

Before detailing the manifold seductions of Art Basel/Miami Beach as the site of a virtual festival of the arts, it should be noted that the anchor fair was in good form. In fact, we thought that this year’s fair featured better examples and greater diversity than those of the past few years. The highly selected 267 galleries representing 32 countries brought to Miami Beach many of the popular blue-chip artists we read about in well-advertised one-person shows and contemporary art auctions. For those far from the Whitney Museum Frank Stella retrospective, many galleries displayed his paintings, providing a mini-Stella exhibition. There were also outrageous works like a 7-foot tall pair of blue and white polar bears by Paola PIVI made of foam, plastic and feathers at Galerie Perrotin and ingenious works like the wooden stools by John Preus at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery made from materials salvaged from recently closed Chicago Public Schools and selling for $800.00. Disturbingly, this year’s fair even included an actual stabbing event that was misinterpreted by some fair goers as performance art and others as an act of terrorism. We also sampled several of the close to twenty satellite fairs spread throughout Miami and Miami Beach and found the quality generally high.

There was a time just fourteen years ago when Art Basel/Miami Beach was a singular event of excellence that was accompanied by a handful of satellite fairs for those priced out of the main event or in search of emerging artists. While it is still a top-notch fair, its role has changed. Now, for art lovers internationally and for the Miami area, it gradually has taken on the role of a catalyst that sets in motion a veritable festival of the arts—in the spirit of Black Mountain College where many art forms collided and interacted. Indeed, one of the most Black Mountain-like events involved a collaboration between Silas Riener, a former Merce Cunningham dancer, and Martha Friedman, a Brooklyn-based creator of seductive soft sculptures that morphed into dance costumes at the Pore exhibition at Locust Projects.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, provided a powerful dialogue between the great Holocaust poet, Paul Celan and the Holocaust-drenched sculpture and painting of Anselm Kiefer at the top of his angst-filled game. In Geheimnis der Farne, weighing 50,000 lbs and set in a 2,500 square-foot room built especially for it, the common theme shared by the poet and the sculptor was a focus on ferns, a powerful metaphor for time, given their status as the ancestors of all plants. Along with two other major sculptures and several paintings and drawings occupying 18,000 square feet, this group of seven works is the largest exhibition of Kiefer’s work in the United States to date. In a neighboring room at Margulies’ Warehouse is another compelling dialogue — an immersive sound installation by the Turner-prize winner, Susan Phillipsz, dedicated to the Oscar-winning Austrian composer, Hanns Eisler. Using 12 speakers and 12 canvases, she depicts the struggles of this talented composer who went into exile and emigrated to New York in 1938 after the Nazis banned his work. Ten years later, after writing numerous movie scores in Los Angeles, he was investigated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, blacklisted, and finally deported. Each speaker plays one violin note that collectively combine to form somber tones accompanying the canvases that reveal Eisler’s handwritten and notated archival scores, under the typewritten reports from his FBI file with their own handwriting and deletions. Together with Magulies’ permanent collection of sculpture and photographs, the Warehouse is an essential destination for any serious art lover.

An additional collaboration occurred outside on the terrace of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in a newly commissioned, three hour multimedia extravaganza spread across eight stages. Each featured a dancer choreographed by the popular visual and performance artist Ryan McNamara and an accompanying musician or vocalist performing a new composition written by the British music sensation, Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange). Each duo, bathed in a different colored light, performed a unique routine that encouraged a kind of “movable feast”. Inside PAMM was an outstanding exhibition of nine West Australian Aboriginal artists from the Miami-based collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl. Among the standouts were works by Warlimpirringa Tjapaljarri whose recent exhibition of swirling lines of small dots at Salon 94 in New York City was mesmerizing in its gentle opticality.

Another powerful strand of this festival of the arts was the presence of two well-selected surveys of Los Angeles Light and Space Art.   At the Surf Club in Miami Beach, Joachim Pissarro, in consultation with Terence Riley and John Keenan, curated LAX – MIA: Light + Space, which included both vintage and new sculptures as well as recent paintings by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, John McCracken, Laddie John Dill, Helen Pashgian, and DeWain Valentine. Set in an airy glass-encased building by Richard Meier right off the ocean, it provided an East Coast simulation of the Light and Space that so inspired the West Coast artists represented here. The curators of this show, who used this exhibition to launch their consulting group, Parallel LLC, exemplified another theme of this year’s art week, namely, new attempts to combine art, architecture and design. This was also in evidence at the Design Miami Fair where the interdisciplinary collaborative, Revolution, introduced Volu, (a prefabricated dining pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher), which also included the participation of the designer, Marcel Wanders on a panel held inside the new structure.

The other Light and Space exhibition occurred at Miami’s MANA in Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Collection. Among the approximately 100 exhibited works chosen from Weisman’s trove of more than 1300 paintings and sculptures made in the Golden State since the 1950s was a dimly lit chapel-like room.   It featured a striking Corner Lamp by Larry Bell and an exquisite white disc by Robert Irwin with its classic four overlapping shadows.

Beyond these two Light and Space surveys was, in effect, a mini-retrospective of Larry Bell, the emperor of chemically-coated glass, a technique that created lyrical and ambiguous qualities in his sculptures. In addition to his iconic cubes on display in at least three different galleries at the fairs, another unusual standout was Bell’s island of thirty-six specially treated six-foot square sheets of standing grey, clear, and partially-coated glass panels.   First exhibited at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, it is now presented at the White Cube’s space in Miami’s Design District. This compelling standing wall installation changes dramatically as one moves through and around the glass panes and as they absorb, reflect and transmit the different amounts of daylight.

Given our recently re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba, it is not surprising that Cuban art was very much in evidence in the fairs, galleries, and museums. A standout was the first U.S. exhibition of Gustavo Pérez Monzón at CIFO. The 70 drawings and installations were completed between 1979 and the late 1980s at the height of his prominence in the Cuban art community. Combining aspects of Geometric Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, he used Tarot cards, numerological concepts and a variety of fragile and mixed media on board to represent abstract systems which are simultaneously quasi-logical and emotionally evocative. For this exhibition, he also re-created a complex room-size spider-web-like installation using the elastic threads from socks along with stones and wire.

Our six days in the Miami area left us with our heads spinning. For this year, at least, there is simply nothing on the North American art calendar like the broad array of high-level aesthetic choices available during the week of Art Basel/Miami Beach. We left wanting to see more, but comforted in knowing that we’ll have another chance next December.

Also discussed in this Report 

Anselm Kiefer: Paintings, Sculpture, Installation, and Susan Phillipsz: Innovative Sound Installation, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, October 29, 2015 to April 30, 2016

No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting at Pérez Art Museum Miami, September 17, 2015 to January 3, 2016

LAX – MIA: Light + Space, Curated by Parallel LLC, The Surf Club’s Richard Meier Pavilion, Miami, December 2 to December 12, 2015

Volu Dining Pavilion: Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher for Revolution at Design Miami, December 2 to December 6, 2015

Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Collection at MANA, Wynwood, December 3 to December 6, 2015

Larry Bell 6 x 6: An Improvisation at White Cube, 3930 NE Second Avenue, Melin Building, December 2, 2015 to January 9, 2016

Gustavo Pérez Monzón: Tramas, Selected Works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection at CIFO Art Space , Miami, December 2, 2015 to May 1, 2016

The post From Fair to Festival: A Report on Art Basel/Miami Beach appeared first on artcritical.

22 July to 18 October, 2015
Schaumainkai 63 60596 (at Dürerstraße)
Frankfurt am Main, Germany +49 69 6050980

Frankfurt’s 200-year-old Städel Museum used its impressive 2012 extension to revisit the somewhat unfashionable work of the last generation of artists to come to prominence in the west of a divided Germany. 97 mostly large works by painters born shortly after the war are set out in a mixture of geographic and thematic groupings, which keeps the flow healthily unpredictable: Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg as the main centers, and self-portraits, the body and politics as subject orientations. As in the US and Italy, this era’s expressive figurative painters — dubbed the Junge Wilde (“Wild Youth”) — were seen as an antidote to Minimalism and Conceptualism, and had their moment in the market before the crash of 1987.

Many of these works haven’t been exhibited since then, and only Martin Kippenberger (who died in 1997) and maybe Albert Oehlen have maintained comparable profiles. Otherwise, the mantle of figurative significance has reverted to generations before (Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter) and after (Neo Rauch and the Leipzig school). This show demonstrated that the work, though diverse, benefits from being seen together; that there are more connections than might be assumed with the preceding and succeeding generations; and that it’s worth looking again at a wider spread of the 27 artists included.

How coherent are these paintings, seen as a group? The majority can be described as loosely and somewhat aggressively painted, trading on the apparent speed of execution, with plenty of ambiguity. Maybe it’s me reading backwards to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ended the period covered, but I also found myself drawn into the frequency with which apparent contradictions — of visual languages or content — are brought together in the same painting, as if reflecting the divided nation. That’s to be expected in the section labelled “The Political Collage.” But other rooms feature the phenomenon as well, as in works such as Volker Tannert’s Small Ceremony for the Modern (1982), in which Albert-Speer-like floodlights illuminate a post-war skyscraper, and Gerard Kever’s Untitled (1982), which combines “televised” clouds with “real” ones. A particularly striking example is KaDaWe (1981), a vast (340 x 483 cm) collaboration by Salomé and Luciano Castelli, which adopts and subverts capitalist modes of display by depicting the artists in performance, mimicking the “poses” of meat hanging over a department store butcher’s counter. Kippenberger is the master of this mode, and all four of his works here conjoin disparate elements: Two Proletarian Women Inventors on their Way to the Inventors’ Congress (1984) shows the pair on their way to collect an “innovation award” — which was probably for something already well-established in the West — set against both a Malevichian monochrome and a swirling Abstract Expressionist background, mocking all ideologies equally.

The break from preceding modes doesn’t seem extreme in retrospect. Most of the subjects are straight from the lives of the artists: punk music, sex, the city, painting itself. When the Mülheimer Freiheit group (named for the address of a Cologne studio shared by Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger) give things a kitchily surreal twist, it’s to no radical effect.

The precedents of the Expressionist generation are often explicit: Rainer Fetting’s Large Shower (1981) puts Ernst Ludwig Kirchner figures into a gay sauna; and Egon Schiele is summoned by the quintessentially 1980s pre-VCR action of Werner Büttner’s Self-Portrait Masturbating in a Cinema, which neatly inverts the “paintbrush as penis” trope. A landscape by Berndt Zimmer, Field, Rape (1979), is close to color field abstraction. Walter Dahn’s Double Self (1982) reminded me of David Hockney’s early ‘60s work, when what would become Pop was still messy. And Milan Kunc is close to later mainstream Pop. Looking forward, the artists of the Leipzig school have continuities with their ‘80s forebears, many of whom taught them, though they generally paint with more clarity and a different historical awareness: more a unification of previously competing tendencies, less a tendency to accept clashes within a painting.

Who deserves more attention? There’s nothing here to challenge the primacy of the group who studied together in Hamburg, where Sigmar Polke taught Georg Herold, Werner Büttner, the Oehlen brothers and, of course, Kippenberger; but the geographic picture is complicated by Kippenberger’s move to Berlin in 1978. Bettina Semmer was in that circle, too, and she (along with G.L. Gabriel) emerged as the most substantial female presence in a rather male scene. Each of Semmer’s three contributions are striking in different ways, and though this show doesn’t look at what these artists — most of them still practicing — did next, her subsequent work is also varied and interesting. Tannert (a student of Richter) and Andreas Schulze impress, too, though the latter’s paintings have a monumental stillness rather at odds with the tenor of the show.

The prevailing intensity edges into the histrionic in the weaker works, and the free markmaking becomes more vague than dynamising. Can the so-called 80ers, as a whole, be defended as deliberately practicing “Bad Painting,” which opposes the idea of harmonious art, whether traditional or avant-garde? Kippenberger, as with a naïvely conventional portrait sharpened by the title Mother of Joseph Beuys (1984), delivers persuasively to that agenda. So does Oehlen: two of his works here allow mirrors to disrupt the illusionistic space of the painting, knowingly undermining the established codes. And in Moonlight Falling into the Fuehrer’s Headquarters (1982), they also reflect his viewers back into a space containing a swastika. As the show’s curator, Martin Engler, says, “Contexts are consciously ruptured. The moment of dissolution becomes the content of the image.” I don’t sense the same analytic justification for the apparent badness in all cases, so that I can’t see this show bringing the likes of Helmut Middendorf and Salomé back to international attention. Indeed, perhaps the museum implicitly acknowledges a more national audience by not translating the catalogue into English — as it does those for most shows. None of that, though, detracts from a fascinating and superbly presented time capsule of a survey.

The post Looking Back: A Retrospective of German Figure Painting appeared first on artcritical.

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 is on view at MoMA until August 3, 2014

NORA GRIFFIN: Since this exhibition is so vast and far-reaching, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the major polarities embodied in Polke’s work: the personal and the political; the sacred and profane; and the mystic and the materialist. Do others agree with this idea of Polke (which I believe the museum was successful in presenting) — as powerfully doubled in all he does?  I thought the atrium provided a kind of “best of” Polke — from the intimate watercolor/drawings of the 60s to the gigantic, beautifully lush abstract fabric painting Season’s Hottest Trends (2003). But two works in this room really stood out for me as book-ends to his practice. Starry Heavens Cloth (1968), a tactile cotton, cardboard “painting” that functions like a cosmological self-portrait of the artist, and The Hunt for the Taliban and Al Quaeda (2002), a massive digital print on vinyl that looks like an industrial army map or poster.  Are there other pairings of works (or bodies of work) in the exhibition that open up his practice?

SUZANNE JOELSON: The other pairing for me is between the private and the performative. The small journal drawings which are signed way after the fact, often without dates, were a way to think as opposed to the paintings that were clearly made for an audience. I often feel left out of his intimate work because they were not necessarily made to be seen. The bulk of his film projects were not made to be seen either, but there I am an engaged voyeur.

SAUL OSTROW: Funny – beside the weird decisions like the drawings – unlike the Brooklyn Museum show of some years ago where he was presented in an “orderly” manner, I thought the MOMA installation was more in keeping with Polke and his work – the chaos – the scale  – the sense of compression seemed very connected.

JOELSON: While this show might have seemed chaotic it provided a narrative order to Polke’s output that was not in the Brooklyn Museum show. Although there are no wall texts one gets the opening atrium space, then the student work, then the early career. His dots are so much more playful and visually delirious than that programmatic method tends to be. The explosion of the Afghan room and then the settling into a studio practice as a way to travel. A final coming home to alienation as process. What distinguishes Polke from his American counterparts is his complete distrust of commerce. Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Warhol et al had some irony in their awe of the abundant market but Polke was entirely distrustful. The crankiness of his stance, his refusal to maintain a look, is part of what is important in the work. I came to feel in this show that his alienation was where he knew himself. When he got comfortable in West Germany he had to travel for that sense of horror. Eventually he set up unpredictable situations in his processes to keep the sense of alienation alive at home. That is what we, who like to label, might call his “mature work.”

ERIC GELBER: I have no qualms with the avoidance of strict chronology. It is the lack of depth I mind. But this is a beef with curatorial practice. I wish they had given a large wall strictly to his works on paper. The huge show that the MoMA had in the 1990s of his works on paper was the first and best encounter I had with Polke’s work. The work in that show, almost all of which is missing here, was busy, frantic, truly eye and mind opening from a formal perspective. We also shouldn’t forget the backdrop of Nazism, which haunted almost all of Polke’s work. Not only was Polke anti-capitalist he was also anti-art to a certain extent, always undermining any painterliness by generating and canceling out compositional elements. I wish there were more works from the 70s, busy paintings with stickers and other added material. That is when his anti-capitalist spirit was truly inspired, in my opinion. Talking about dualities, the profane/mystical might be helpful in terms of iconography, but as ideas I think it is kind of silly to crucify his work on those particular crosses. Not unlike Kiefer, he had a morbid fascination with Germany’s Nazi past: the swastika was seared into his consciousness.

OSTROW: I’m not sure if it’s alienation – he reflects a very particular German experience – his work reflects post-war Germany – the period of de-Nazification, the division of East and West, the rapid rebuilding of West Germany, the tension of the Cold War – etc. and then there is also the German tradition of the artist as magician and fool – as such he makes this work against a very different background then his counterparts in the States. One needs to remember that all of Warhol’s celebs are tragic figures – I think that the idea that he is enthralled with is the public role that Warhol plays – likewise I ‘m not sure that Polke is such an outsider – when I lived in Cologne you would see him and his entourage – he was very public – the notion of the magnus is probably more applicable than that of the mystic – peyote, LSD, opium, and mescaline get one to the otherside without necessarily having anything to do with transcendence – therefore I tend to see Polke as trying to produce a type of social realism of the psyche

JOELSON: I am thinking not only of personal alienation associated with his move to West Germany at the age of 12 when most of us feel alienated from our bodies anyway, but of Brechtian alienation, innate in the engagement and denial in the work. Yes, and re: “social realism of the psyche” would you say then, getting back to Nora’s initial dualities- psychic realism and capitalist realism?

OSTROW: Perhaps what we are seeing in the Polke show is what it means to be a Stateless artist – whereas Gerhard Richter is the work of a refugee who in order to fit in becomes more patriotic than a native born citizen. Polke is like an alien who continues to identify with the old country – though if he goes back he no longer recognizes anyone and all of the places he’s familiar with are gone.

DREW LOWENSTEIN: Polke’s historical and cultural negotiation is more open to play, and wonderment than that of Kiefer or Richter.  Like Kiefer, he experiments with materials and comes to believe in a traditional form of the total artwork.  Pagannini, The Illusionist, and Mrs Autumn and her Two Daughters are examples.  But unlike Kiefer, Polke rejects Beuysian shamanism and does not peddle the idea of recovery or regeneration from the German Nazi past.  Additionally, the painting Constructivist (1968), points out  Polke’s suspicion of adopting international modernist idioms to mask the past and  also reflects a distrust of the art culture market. He is resistant and like Suzanne suggests alienated. His resistance and playfulness is his pathway to creative struggle and freedom. I think it’s important to remember that he doesn’t find this resistance antithetical to historical painting.  He is quoted on the first page of the catalogue as saying, “even if the results look new, as far as I am concerned, as an artist I am following an academic path.  I like tracking down certain pictures, techniques and procedures.  It’s a way of understanding what is largely determined by tradition.”

GRIFFIN: Just to take up the thread of commerce and Pop art as seen in Polke’s work in the early 60s. I kept ruminating on the idea of an “abject” Pop art. Chocolate Painting and Biscuits (both 1964) seem so innocent, almost naively painted, with the gloss and definition of sign painting. The “abstract” paintings from the same era Jewelry,Beans,Silver Break, and Snowdrops seem edgily contemporary to me, perhaps this has to do with the paintings’ surface: colored, or patterned fabric, a recurring material for Polke. Suzanne says: “What distinguishes Polke from his American counterparts is his complete distrust of commerce. Rauschenberg, Ginsberg Warhol et al had some irony in their awe of the abundant market but Polke was entirely distrustful.” I agree here, that his images of marketable “things” are always highly personalized and never about glorifying the objects. The restraint and paint handling reminds me of John Wesley a bit. Especially the seriality of the enamel painting Socks (1963).

GELBER: Polke saying whether or not he feels alienated doesn’t help us get into the work. What artist is allowed to be anything but alienated from the history and politics of their native country? I think alienation is the default setting we expect all of our important artists to live by. Supermarkets (1976), Paganini (1981-83) and the “Color Experiments” from (1982-86) were highlights for me. John Wesley is a good call but I think Polke was more interested in the subversive qualities of the comics he stole from rather than their aesthetic qualities. He liked black outlining, like Max Beckmann did, and Polke turned towards allegory in his late work. I find Polke to be a stronger draftsman than a painter. He worked on cloth because it lent itself to collage and staining rather than nuanced layering of tones. The “Color Experiments” series are probably the most purely painterly stuff in the exhibition. In Supermarkets he is mocking consumerism, but clearly he loves the imagery he puts to use as an ideological bludgeon.

OSTROW: Polke’s work can be seen to be discursive in the sense that it is a series of dialogues with and about the very Law he has decided not to partake in – in a manner he stands beside the very traditions that would subsume him and in doing so deploys them as he wishes. I was struck by how Polke seems to engage the notion of the return not only of the repressed but of the desired – he does this by projecting one onto another – his imagery  tends to be metonymic rather than metaphorical. If painting is to be about opticality – he literally paints distortion, if it is to be about process he paints process, if it is about the impossibility of narrative – he paints narratives of self-cancellation, etc. In this way he is literal without being illustrative. I’ve been reading the new translation of Kafka’s The Trial and find a parallel between Kafka’s writing and Polke’s painting in the sense that everything is always itself and its own other. If I understand it, Suzanne’s reference was to Brechtian alienation which is performative – it is a way to engage the audience in such a manner that the illusion of the theater is itself made explicit – they are distanced so that they might watch themselves being manipulated. In this sense the artist Polke may be most like is early Jasper Johns in which behind his dumb literal surfaces lurks philosophy, self-doubt and the desire to paint a figure, rather than a picture of one.

JOELSON: Regarding Eric’s statement, “I think alienation is the default setting we expect all of our important artists to live by.”  As much as I resist seeing “default” or “expect all” in a sentence about art, I do agree. Is this because as a culture we are fixated on adolescence, a time of emergent sexuality and change? This is reflected in our taste for unfinished paintings from Cézanne and Manet to current work which conveys potential rather than certainty.I think it was Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books who said that the fascination with emigré writing is because anyone who has gone through adolescence knows what it is to be alienated from your childhood. Something about “best offerings” is anathema to enthusiasts of Polke’s high wire act. We are more interested in his near misses. When I saw one watchtower painting 20 years ago I thought it the worst Polke ever because it was didactic and humorless and bound to its over potent image. In this show, seeing six of them I was moved. They evoke Auschwitz but also the idea of purposeful directed looking and the anxiety of being watched. Many towers in a room seem inescapable as opposed to a lone dismissible picture in an art show, or it might be the change in times and a recent predilection toward content. I wanted to see them in a circle.

GELBER: This is a great idea – it would turn the viewer into the viewed in a literal sense. You would become self-conscious in the act of looking by becoming the surrounded object. I know that Polke wanted to conjure up feelings of foreboding with this series. The colors are dark, dreary, anti-humanist. And I did spend a lot of time in this room with them, but I found myself thinking things like, “Oh is that a shower curtain he stuck on there?” I wanted to be moved by them more than I was. I think the way we see has been changed by the computer monitor and handheld device screen. I am not convinced that this will radically alter the painting and drawing process, with regards to how viewers take them in. Certainly painters have been impacted by pixelated imagery, webpage layout, Photoshop filters, etc. Polke’s struggle with pictorial space is one of the most interesting characteristics of his work. If an artist is going to work with traditional formats how can they make something that is genuinely contemporary, or is pastiche or mimicry the only options at this point?

JOELSON: Another Polke polarity is between the barest gesture, the incidental image and the magnum opus. This was also the case in the drawing show years back. A stick of butter on one wall and the whole acid trip covering another. The underwhelming aspect of so much work invites the viewer to complete the picture, to meet it halfway. In “our moment here” everything is going on. There are a lot of little umbrellas outside and within the big tent of the art market. From artists who have to work full time to cover their rent and then have little time in the studio, to artists who imagine extensive labor will fill-in where inspiration ended, from “bring it on” to enough is enough. Ezra Pound’s modernist adage to “make it new” has been replaced by “make it extreme.” Is that a reflection of our national economy? One thing about Germany is they still have an effective middle class and they build things (cars, appliances). How does this affect art in Germany now? I loved how the sausages are simple flat foot food, and yet essentialist in form. I think we have an internally informed, biological response to that linkage.

GRIFFIN: Saul made this comparison of Polke to Johns which I find illuminating: “In this sense the artist he may be most like is early Jasper Johns in which behind his dumb literal surfaces lurks philosophy – self doubt and the desire to paint a figure, rather than a picture of one.”  Of the many personas and alibis that were presented for the artist in the show, the one I was most moved by was the figure of Polke as a painter, confined to the rectangle, pigment, and fabric. The compactness and formalism of his paintings is breathtaking and really (to me) makes the performances, film footages, photographs, and even the drawings, seem lightweight and inconsequential. I understand that the show was presenting a full-blown portrait of Polke as an artist here, but I did yearn for a show that just displayed the paintings so we might focus on the most masterful aspect of his work. Llyn Foulkes, Chris Martin, and Paul Thek are three American artists I couldn’t stop thinking about as I went through the rooms. The high and low aspects of the sex and drug culture of the 60s and 70s meets the sacred temple of Modernist painting. The urge to bring painting into space itself, to have a painting transcend its physical limits, whether by alchemy (with silver nitrate crystals and meteorite resin), sheer silliness (like the Alice in Wonderland painting), or the horror of history (the watchtower series), seems to be a noble even heroic venture that few artists are involved with today.

OSTROW: Seemingly Polke offers us an alternative to pastiche or mimicry – what he offers us in place of pictures of things is an assemblage (in which each part retains its own identity while offering some aspect of itself to the whole). The effect of this is to force our minds to wander – or to multi-task – in this sense these works emphasize painting as an analog – a means to present information not only  through  its ability to depict things but also by means of  its physical quantities.  Polke demonstrates how the media continuously affects our reading of that information.  There is also a persistent effort by Polke to use a single signifier to reference multiple signified – as such his images exist in a shifting “framework.” These shifts are not a function of the viewer (ie, associations) but the work’s materiality or lack of it – in this we might think of Polke’s work as functioning under the sign of Hermes – whose name is the root for hermeneutics.

LOWENSTEIN: I was not moved by the watchtower paintings. I don’t think Polke does gravitas. Suddenly Germany was thrust into an absurdist geopolitical “role” that created a new narrative that obscured German atrocities.  Germany became a buffer for freedom and commerce against Soviet tyranny.  It’s a mind-blowing free pass.  Soviet/US tension is a gift that fell into Germany’s lap. No wonder the German public was shocked when Polke, Kiefer and others touched on the Holocaust years later.  Polke’s split sense of self manifests in his acute awareness of his “role” as an Adenauer-generation artist.  In a sense, he and his peers were stepping onto the world’s cultural stage as Germany’s representatives in the aftermath of German atrocities. Is the artist’s “role” one of action, escape, cynicism or dreaded consensus?  Polke’s dancing between the raindrops as he plays the role of the art prankster, philosopher, and magician-escapist. This is reflected in the ambiguity, possibility, and cancellation we sense in the work. The split self, the doubling, just spills out.  But he finds a new pictorial space to work in. He discovers an expanded space of transparency when he works both sides of the support and opens up a space for more light by using plastic in the late period lenticular paintings.

OSTROW: We haven’t even touched on Polke’s approach to self-referentiality in the sense of his use of analogy rather than metaphor, for instance the notion of the watch tower is not only a question of the Holocaust, but also that of guarding of borders (the east west divide)- it is also  a platform from which to observe – it represents the vertical view – the overview – which is a view that unlike the horizontal view is disengaged.

GELBER: I believe this was touched on earlier by Suzanne, the act of viewing and being viewed by the watchtowers. She had in mind a Panopticon, the go-to historical reference, thanks to Foucault. I think you are absolutely right about how the vertical orientation makes the watchtowers even more object-like, mimicking the real, in the way a real watchtower sticks out on the horizon in order to assume a position of power over those standing below it. There is a black ominous doorway shape in the painting Paganini that mimics a real doorway, as if we are invited to step into the painting.

JOELSON: I always like paintings of sailboats because there is a built vessel, a soft sail and the linear structure of the rigging. Polke’s watchtowers have that formal appeal as well as much else that has been said. They engage his antagonism to modern visuality as well as to seeing and being seen. It is not just the “gravitas” of the subject but its readiness for interpretation that weights this group. They emerge indelible, an intangible memory or the defining liminal image, a jewel that won’t melt away. The various means lets them flicker in and out of the material of this world. Their appearance as memory is innate to the stencil process. Eric, beside the fact that I think you and I are switching positions, I am confused, do you think Polke was always more accessible than Rauschenberg? Rauschenberg is my first great love. A decade later when I saw Polke he seemed like a shabby dissonant response to Rauschenberg’s innate enthusiasm and harmony with the world. But I came around,  just as after years of John Coltrane I came to love Ornette Coleman.

OSTROW: Another subject that I think needs to be taken up is the photograph and its reproduction. Polke comes back to the Ben-Day dots pattern over and over through his long career, like Warhol he wishes to render photography transparent and mutable.

GELBER: I think Polke’s (and Richter’s and Kiefer’s) need to break down the barriers between photography and painting/drawing goes hand-in-hand with Polke’s breaking down the barrier between drawing and painting in many works. The breaking down of compositional elements, combining different types of media, the flattening out collage effect, things discovered during Braque’s and Picasso’s analytical cubist phase, are deeply explored by Polke.

LOWENSTEIN: I think it’s a given that Polke and his peers were displaced from the Western narrative of how Modernism unfolded. Polke fell in love with Dada and Surrealism and stayed in love unconditionally. Sure, he misunderstood Pop, and merged it with Modernist-utopian ideas of art as agitation for change. But happily, dislocation and misunderstanding turned into the mother of invention and we get this wonderful art. It reminds me of a story about how the Marx Brothers were trying to steal a look at a baseball game but from their vantage point outside the stadium, they could only see action in a slice of left field. From that bit of information, they speculated and filled in the plays that they missed. Needless to say it was a more interesting version than what occurred on the field.

The post A Critics’ Roundtable on Sigmar Polke at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

In 2007 Anselm Kiefer stated “Americans think there is good and bad.  That’s not true.  The truth is wandering around.”  Fair enough, but some of Kiefer’s themes have sharp moral divisions.  The Metropolitan Museum has mounted a mini retrospective of about 30 small pieces selected from its Kiefer holdings, one as recent as 2004.   The early watercolors from 1969 – 85 represent the bulk of the show.   Although technical distinction is rarely evident in his watercolors, Kiefer’s keen and decisive knack of finding and assembling his signature themes and compositions is astonishingly present from the start.  It is content rather than painting ability that speaks loudest here.

In Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome Of Heaven (1970), a diminished, isolated figure, enveloped in a transparent dome, assumes the Nazi salute within a deeply receding landscape.  From text we understand that Kiefer mocks the salute, but context is relative and meaning is subject to change.  That the salute is summoned in several pieces is plain to see. Regarding the image, Kiefer has equivocally stated “every man has his own dome, his own perceptions, his own thoughts.  There is no one God for all.”   Despite the moral relativism, Kiefer is certain that he is a soldier artist recovering historic facts from the ground of recent memory.  And as an agent of Neo Expressionism, Kiefer assumes that although there are pauses, everything is in play and that everything old rises new again with a twist of the eternally recurring historical spiral.

In his colorful On Every Mountain Peak There Is Peace (1971), and the sepia toned Reservoir(1971), Kiefer delivers both the romantic landscape of dreamy escapism and the reverent nostalgia of the forest as a repository of strength and national identity.  If Kiefer is trying to grapple with the aftermath of National Socialism or offer a critique, it is unclear.  Functionally these pieces reinforce the symbolic status of the forest used in German and Norwegian landscape painting of the 1820’s. By pointedly reviving the brooding, animistic portraits of heroically silhouetted trees via C. D. Freidrich, Kiefer advertently rekindles the slippery, errant ideologies inherent to the subject matter that he is drawn to.  The legendary status of trees merged with the purity and heroic invincibility of the German soldiers when the Roman attack on Germainia was repelled at the Battle of Teutoburger Forest in 9AD and continues to resonate nationally today.

In Winter Landscape (1970) Kiefer paints a head floating over a landscape.   Given the nature of this subject, the degree to which this head relates to Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy is jarring.  The disembodied head bleeds from the neck, spotting the ashen-speckled, snow-covered landscape below.  In this saturnine romanticization of death Kiefer depicts an ascension, while blood and ash settle on the ground in seeming reference to the Jewish extermination. As the Nazis believed in purifying the land from Jews by fire, so Kiefer, in an act of creative hubris, counters by cleansing the disaster through belief in the alchemic ritual of his art process.  Although mass shootings of the Jewish population occurred across the landscape of Eastern Europe, the constancy with which Kiefer entwines the Holocaust into the eternally recurring woodland heritage of German Volk is disconcerting.  Kiefer operates under the assumption that land is still a living testament to German identity.  As recently as 1983 Chancellor Helmut Kohl declared: “Mythology, Germans and the forest – they all belong together.”  Kiefer posits that such land, recently fertilized with a tragic layer of ash, can be sanctified by confession, creative ritual and representations of nature as culture.  Such a premise seems bewildering, if not profane.  To this end Kiefer dons the shamanistic uniform patterned from the eminent sculptor and legendary former volunteer Luftwaffe pilot Joseph Beuys, and attempts to mediate fact by reenacting a drama of myth and symbol.

Unlike most Adenauer-era kids raised in the crosshairs of the Soviet presence and the Marshall Plan, Kiefer bucked, and resisted the notion of a divide separating German generations.  Instead, Kiefer strategically implicates himself and by extension, his post-war generation as inheritors of the totality of German history.     As such Kiefer is a complicated independent, one who adopts the revanchist Neo Expressionist mode of his peers, yet embraces and exposes the repressed and tangled complexities of German life.  Mere mention of the Jewish extermination was still taboo in Germany until very recently.   Yet this is the debased standard to which Kiefer’s stance as a self-professed sufferer of his nations deeds is compared and lauded.

In Stefan! (1974), the head of German poet Stefan George oddly hovers and merges with a mountain top.  Kiefer applies himself to the task of rehabilitating George from the fascistic flirtations, messiah complex, heroic German idealizations, and elitism that all earned George reverence from Nazi officialdom.  One can speculate that George’s self-absorbed mysticism particularly engaged Kiefer.   George’s anti modernist views and advocacy of artists’ independence from political clarity may have also struck a chord with Kiefer’s own brand of subjectivism during a period of conceptualist dissolutions and authorial death.  In this instance, Kiefer assumes the role of judge and redeemer who will liberate George from the misinterpretations of cumbersome readers.

In the pieces from 1985 thru 2004 Kiefer moves beyond usual expressionist tropes.  Painted on chemically manipulated photographs, and incorporating lead and shellac, these pieces renew our interest beyond the subject.  There is a fluidity of composition and freedom in these pieces that Kiefer’s watercolors and large, theatrical, stage-set paintings don’t achieve.  In these small paper works, Kiefer has relaxed his grid: the high horizon line and deeply furrowed perspective borrowed from Van Gogh.  In Miracle of the Serpents (1985), Kiefer layers diaphanous image and gesture within the activated photo emulsion.   There is a seemingly effortless and randomized approach to the field that allows the symbols of the Exodus narrative to almost flicker and move.  Additionally, in Strike and Heavy Cloud (1985), Keifer’s use of lead slabs affixed to the surface of the paper creates a physical connection to the viewer.  The emphatic material surface fittingly co-exists with the indication of landscape and depth of field in the photo image.  Kiefer may have clocked in, but we’re not faced with the labor-intensive insistence of the large paintings.  Instead, formally speaking, these are wonderfully immediate, ah-ha moments.

Similarly constructed with manipulated photos, paint and shellac, Emanation (1985) and Aziluth(2004) display a similar buoyancy and immediacy.  Unfortunately the agenda-driven content elbows its way in and betrays a distracting pseudo-spirituality, in which kabalistic thought, a recently popularized aspect of Jewish philosophy, is cherry picked and assumed by the outsider in the name of spiritual healing and repair. But for whom?  Kiefer posits that with just the right dose of national soul searching and memoriam, artwork can set you free, but his multivalent formulas remain woefully paradoxical.   Touching upon such life-extinguishing events is best left to an artist who passed through and left myth behind, an experienced practitioner of the timeless and tragic, such as Mark Rothko.

The post Broken Flowers and Grass: Nature and Landscape in the Drawings of Anselm Kiefer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art appeared first on artcritical.

Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba ran from November 8 to December 14; the catalogue is available from Gagosian Gallery at $80.

What extraordinary scene changes an art gallery can witness. Take the Gagosian Gallery. One week it’s Anselm Kiefer, the next Michael Craig-Martin. Where else can a charnel house become a nursery within seven days? The make over gives new meaning to the expression, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Truly, Craig-Martin’s rip off (Adami/Caulfield) neo-conceptualist wallpaper represents a low point in contemporary artistic culture. But maybe it’s just the eye candy we all needed chez Gagosian after all that sturm und drang. And just maybe, I hear a doubting Thomas sound in my head as I try to sort out my feelings about St Anselm, the change is not so drastic after all.

If I am understanding correctly the claim made by legendary literary critic Harold Bloom in his catalogue essay for Larry Gagosian, then Anselm Kiefer, dean of romantic neo-expressionists, has taken on the Almighty as a counter-creator ex nihilo. Professor Bloom magisterially vaunts Anselm Kiefer as the most intellectually and spiritually ambitious creator in any medium at work today. The critic’s prose, written it would seem in a kabbalistic trance, finds its match in the artist’s materials as far as bombast and density are concerned. Kiefer’s monumental installations in lead, concrete, and rusted steel, his landscapes painted, literally, in scorched earth, heaped-on straw and other appropriated matter, have an eerie, post-nuclear grandeur about them. The German artist, who was born in 1945, transformed the already hangar-like Gagosian Gallery into an occult cathedral with his installation, Merkaba, the title of which alludes to the celestial visions of the prophet Ezekiel.

The scale alone of Kiefer’s fiercely monumental works seems to lay claim to a contemporary sublime, and that’s before the viewer focuses upon the heady themes and issues at stake. The disasters of modernity, including the Holocaust, jostle disconsolately in a bubbling cauldron of ideas and associations with explicit references to Jewish mysticism and European poetry. But to a skeptic unwilling to see the new Michelangelo in all this melancholy murk, Harry, Larry and Anselm form a veritable triumvurate of hubris.

Bloom and Gloom certainly both know how to lay it on thick. The essay is a mystical-heretical romp through occultism, literary theory, and modernist poetics, a heady heap of allusions, wild associations, and creative misreadings. Kiefer’s art, meanwhile, is every bit as highly textured, literally as well as intellectually. There is paint on photographs, with lines of verse and portentous names and references scribbled in the artist’s nervous hand. There are broken up staircases, burned books, wire cages and steel traps. NASA star numbers transform this artful mess into a map of the universe. It is easy for artist and viewer alike simply to wallow in all this gorgeous texture. These earthy, charred, rusting swamps of primordial chaos are a kind of post-apocalyptic lily pond. Underneath all his heady metaphysics, Kiefer is a supremely tasteful decorator.

And I don’t mean this as a slight. Meaning has an entirely different currency in criticism and art. In art, mystification is fine; “fool’s gold” can buy you a retirement plan. The mere sensation of metaphysics, a little highbrow name-dropping, “purposiveness without purpose” as Kant called it – texture, in other words – are swell. But in criticism one really is after boring old-fashioned clarity; whereas grand claims, befuddlement, false leads, bravura connections are somehow perfectly fine for art, where posture and ambiguity can point to deeper meanings. To me, it feels less blasphemous for Kiefer to play God than for Bloom to play artist.

To pursue the fool’s gold metaphor – the currency crisis with Kiefer, whose paintings genuinely awe the responsive viewer, has to do with form, not meaning. Sure, they sustain consistent emotion over an incredible space – no mean achievement – but once one comes to terms with the scale and one is duly impressed by the bravura handling and the intensity of the artist’s symbolism, there is this debilitating sense of gratuitousness. The conundrum in Kiefer is that to decipher is to detract, but left as charred books, rusty cages, and angst-ridden scrawls this stuff doesn’t really lead to formal satisfactions. Say, meanwhile, they did, Kiefer would be in worse trouble. For, if as Gauguin said, nothing that is pretty can be beautiful, then, even more so, is this true of the sublime.

The sublime is that which engenders deeply ambiguous emotion- fear, terror, the horror vacui. We are just too damned used, however, to the textures of angst and the tones of despair, learning all too easily to aestheticise them. Unless that is the point, that Kiefer is trading on an acutely post-war German frisson of guilty pleasure, of finding beauty where it should not be.

In this respect, Kiefer’s whole joust with German history is eminently typical of the neo-expressionists who dominated the 1980s. His renderings of Albert Speer’s fascistic architecture and his allusions to Wagnerian themes were symptomatic of the Bad Boy stance of that period. Nazi paraphernalia teased the consciences of the new Germany in the work of countless painters such as Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. The zeitgeist determined that, for avantgardist street cred, painting (the very act of painting was transgressive after a 1970s dominated by conceptual art and installation) needed to be in giant, ever-so-intellectual quotation marks.

Kiefer launched his career with anything but subtle irony. He would dress as a storm trooper and stage performances “annexing to the Reich” art galleries in countries like Belgium which had not so long ago suffered occupation for real. He would stand at landmarks like the Colisseum in Rome and give the Hitler salute. On one occasion it was sig heil by the seaside, in emulation of Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic icon, Wanderer Over the Misty Sea.

Then came a “brown period” (literally, and still politically), a scorched earth policy of debunking romantic myth. By now, however, Kiefer was beginning to believe his own once-mock metaphysics. Irony fast evaporated as artist and audience alike somehow managed to forget the historical and political disasters his romanticism and mysticism were cooked up to confront. In this respect, I can’t help feeling that Kiefer is like an avantgarde composer who once, in a radical move, quoted an um-pa-pa band only to be stopped in his tracks by a lovely tune, thereafter devoting himself in earnest to pastiche waltzes.

In Harold Bloom’s Kiefer essay, a rare departure into art writing for Yale’s Sterling Professor of Humanities, the critic becomes prophet in the wilderness, his German artist a kind of art messiah. Bloom’s self-professed career obsession has been “the anxiety of influence”. He staked his reputation on audacious, brilliantly argued interpretations of poets like Blake and Milton “misreading” their predecessors in their oedipal struggles for originality. To Bloom, Kiefer presents the awesome spectacle of the divine artist who generates his own tropes, defying “what seems to me the immutable principles of influence in the arts.” Bloom sends us back to Joyce, Stravinsky, and Picasso in search of originators as original, but finds the pioneers of modernism lacking, by way of comparison. Even Blake is faulted for relying too heavily on Michelangelo. “Kiefer knowingly transcends the limits of any visual art.”

In point of fact, Kiefer is supremely conscious of his connections to art of the recent and distant past alike. Frankly, a Yale Art School freshman could put the Sterling Professor of Humanities right on this point. For a start, all that texture in Kiefer, the matière stuck onto his canvases and sprawled on the floor, is impossible without the French existentialist graffiti artist Dubuffet and without arte povera, the Italian minimalist movement, and without Rauschenberg, inventor of gray mush over photographs, and without Cy Twombly, master of the artful scrawl. None of this is to deny that Anselm Kiefer is highly inventive, possibly indeed superior to peers and forebears alike. But his art derives some at least of its meaning in relation to other art, and Professor Influence of all people should know this.

As for the artist as shaman, the melancholy romantic genius, giver of art life to gloom-filled detritus: totally impossible without the guru of German postmodernity, Joseph Beuys (also, incidentally, a big scribbler, in his case on blackboards.) It so happens that, on visual and conceptual grounds alike, I would take Kiefer over Beuys any day, but exalting the originality of the former without bothering with the latter is rather like attributing all the cinematic inventions of Alfred Hitchcock to Brian de Palma.

The post The Irony and the Ecstasy: Michael Craig-Martin and Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.