Anselm Kiefer: I hold all the Indias in my hand

This is Anselm Kiefer’s first London exhibition for five years. It is also the first time that this new and dramatically different body of work has been seen in Britain.

Kiefer gained international attention when (with Baselitz) he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980. He was born just before the end of World War 2 in a small town in Germany’s Black Forest not far from the French border. Following the country’s re-unification in 1991, Kiefer decided to leave Germany. The ensuing four years represent a period of enormous change in his work and were also marked by a great deal of travel around the world to places such as Mexico, India, China, Japan and Australia. He finally settled in Southern France in one of the former silk factories located in the countryside behind Montpelier.

The physical and mental voyages of this period are manifest in Kiefer’s recent paintings. First of all the subject matter is different. Where the universal themes used to hide behind Germanic ones, the latter have now fallen away, giving place to a wider range of references to oriental spiritual traditions, yoga, alchemy and man’s relationship to the rest of the universe.

In a new series of woodcuts, the images of Germany’s spiritual heroes have given place to the ubiquitous sunflowers of southern France, which so affected Van Gogh a hundred years before. Some of these huge paper pieces created from massive wooden blocks gouged by the artist at great speed show towering black sunflowers alone at various stages of their cycle of life, death and re-birth. Many works, such as those painted with the shadowy rolling dunes of the North African desert, are studded all over with sunflower seeds. They suggest a generative presence halfway between a buzzing cloud of insects and the vibrating starry skies of the southern hemisphere.

The title of the exhibition is a quotation from a sonnet by Francesco de Quevedo in which he writes of a man holding a ring that bears the portrait of his beloved. The image acts like a mandala as a focus for meditation. With the poet’s contemplation of it comes a consciousness of the universe and his place within it. ‘I hold the starry plains of heaven,’ he writes. ‘I hold all Indias in my hand.’

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with a text by the American critic Thomas McEvilley.

Anselm Kiefer
I hold all the Indias in my hand