Anselm Kiefer Walhalla

Anselm Kiefer Walhalla

[df-subtitle]23 Nov 2016 – 12 Feb 2017[/df-subtitle]

[textmarker color=”000000″]Anselm Kiefer Walhalla exhibition at the White Cube Bermondsey [/textmarker]

White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition by Anselm Kiefer featuring new, large-scale installation, sculpture and painting. Titled ‘Walhalla’, the exhibition refers to the mythical place in Norse mythology, a paradise for those slain in battle, as well as to the Walhalla neo-classical monument, built by Crown Prince Ludwig in 1862 in Bavaria to honour heroic figures in German history.

Throughout his career, Kiefer has interwoven themes of history, politics and landscape into his work, revisiting imagery and symbolism through different forms and media. His work conflates and connects themes, resonating with the idea of history as one continuous cycle. In the past, for example, Kiefer has employed the symbolism of Norse mythology alongside the forms of National Socialist architecture, and for this exhibition he uses this as a basis for dramatic new paintings and sculpture that deal simultaneously with notions of creation and destruction, life and death.

In the main corridor space, a major new installation which links to Kiefer’s earlier work The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Re?volution) (1992/2013), features rows of steel beds covered with dark grey, crumpled lead sheets. The beds are set close together, within a long, narrow room that has also been lined with oxidised lead. Above each bed, a small label bears the hand-written name of a person that is significant to the artist and, at the end of the room, a black and white photograph mounted on lead depicts a lone figure walking away into a bleak, wintery landscape. The whole installation, darkly lit and sombre, suggests an institutional dormitory or military sleeping quarters: one that is toxic and deathly, creating the feeling of claustrophobia and morbidity.