This week will see the opening of Anselm Kiefer’s Walhalla exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey (23 Nov 2016 – 12 Feb 2017), in which the artist revives the image of Walhalla through his new paintings, depicting the hall of the gods in Germanic and norse legend, reimagining death, time and the end of the world.
The art of Anselm Kiefer is thick with history – and thick with paint, which he heaps up on his vast canvases along with ash, sunflowers and words. The connection of art and life is, for this self-consciously German artist, not some vague optimistic ideal but a tragically unavoidable fact. The Wagnerian grandiosity of north-European myth, tainted as it is by the Nazi era, returns in Kiefer’s art as a mirror of history, identity and feeling.
[Source: White Cube]