Currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea is “Next Year in Jerusalem” by Anselm Kiefer the artist’s first exhibition in New York since 2002. This has exhibition is in the largest of the Gagosian galleries and has been met with acclaim in the critical press. The exhibition blends film making, performance and photography as well as history and religious thought into powerful installations with a message. The works focus on Occupations, where Kiefer transforms a series of photographs from 1969 where the artist appears making the Hitlergruß in front of a significant European cultural monument.
More text and images after the jump…
Fitzcarraldo (2010) by Anselm Kiefer, via Gagosian Gallery
Occupations is composed of a steel enclosure wherein there are seventy-six newly printed large-scale photographs which are mounted on lead and hung slightly apart from each other on thick metal hooks. The viewer catches only a glimpse of the works inside through the open doors of the container but can sense the presence of a greater mass of images. The work reminds the spectator of the atrocities man is capable of committing; the piece re-enacts a dark moment in history in visceral confrontation with present reality.
Flying Fortress (2010) by Anselm Kiefer, via Gagosian Gallery
Kiefer has placed glass and steel vitrines more than twenty-feet tall around Occupations. Each vitrine contains organic and inorganic material such as cotton dresses, palms, brushes, burned books and airplane fuselage with titles placed on the glass of each work as if they were some commemorative ritual object.
Die Sefiroth (2010) by Anselm Kiefer, via Gagosian Gallery
Lead is an item which contains a particular ritual and historical reference for the artist. In Valentius, a work named after the 2nd century Gnostic theologian, lead buckets and chains are placed alongside synthetic diamonds and wire. In Die Schechina, a white dress pieced by numerous glass shards appears on an invisible figure. The work is in reference to one of the ten Kabbalistic markers of spiritual presence.
Next Year in Jerusalem by Anselm Kiefer Installation View, via Gagosian Gallery
Lead is an item which contains a particular ritual and historical reference for the artist. In Valentius, a work named after the 2nd century Gnostic theologian, lead buckets and chains are placed alongside synthetic diamonds and wire.
Next Year in Jerusalem by Anselm Kiefer Installation View, via Gagosian Gallery
Large landscape paintings made from ash, snakeskin, and other earthen materials hang on the walls depicting mountains, forests and the sea. Fitzcarraldo is made of four panels and portrays a winter forest scene and a lead U-boat in reference to the late 19th-century Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald who is so famously moved a thirty-ton boat across an isthmus to avoid treacherous circumstances. The work is encased in a large vitrine bestowing it with greatness and reverence.
Next Year in Jerusalem by Anselm Kiefer Installation View, via Gagosian Gallery
Next Year in Jerusalem is a monumental archive of works which give history a present form and memory. The exhibition brings together references from the Old and New Testament, the Kabbalah, and ancient Roman history and also the poetry of Paul Célan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Kiefer materializes the fragility, power and beauty of life and death in these works. He gives human memory a form and urges the viewer against forgetting the past revealing how the present is so intimately linked with what came before.
Next Year in Jerusalem by Anselm Kiefer Installation View, via Gagosian Gallery
Next Year in Jerusalem by Anselm Kiefer Installation View, via Gagosian Gallery
Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Gagosian Gallery]
Netherworld Chic, Surreal Impressions: Anselm Kiefer’s Next Year in Jerusalem [WSJ]
Pass Over in Silence: Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian Gallery [The NYObserver]
‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ [NY Times]
A Spectacle With a Message [NY Times]
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