Assessment: “Anselm Kiefer: Changing into the Sea” at Saint Louis Artwork Museum

Welcome to One Advantageous Present, the place Observer highlights a just lately opened exhibition at a museum not in New York Metropolis, a spot we all know and love that already receives loads of consideration.

The very best exhibition of labor by Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) that I’ve seen up to now was held on the Doge’s Palace in Venice in 2022. This grandiose venue of political intrigue turned out to be the right place for the German artist’s large-scale scenes of luxurious destruction. The gilded furnishings all the time lead so naturally to the Bridge of Sighs and the adjoining jail. Even the colour scheme of burnt ochre and gray went nicely with the palace’s wealthy wooden and sometimes literal darkness.

It could be arduous to think about many locations extra totally different from Venice than Saint Louis, but the Saint Louis Artwork Museum, which simply opened “Anselm Kiefer: Changing into the Sea,” shouldn’t be as unlikely a venue for a present of the artist as you would possibly assume. What the 2 cities have in frequent is water, which is essential to Kiefer’s tide pool worlds. In 1991, the artist journeyed up the Mississippi throughout a go to to St. Louis, a formative journey that evoked the Rhine of his childhood. The exhibition options 40 works from the Seventies by to the current, with greater than 20 works made within the final 5 years and 5 monumental site-specific work.

Considered one of these new works, Missouri, Mississippi (2024), commemorates that journey from 1991. It’s gigantic like all of them, 30 ft by 27 ft. Dominating the scene is the top of the journey when, in a small boat, the artist stumbled on the Melvin Worth Lock and Dam in Alton, Illinois. Waves crash in opposition to the large edifice, which apparently has a collection of mysterious ethereal buildings atop it like a collection of unusual an identical Parthenons, however that is solely the underside half of the portray. Within the prime we see the water swirling round a lady’s physique. She’s some form of tortured river goddess or perhaps simply lifeless.

Being dwarfed by that big dam in 1991 may need impressed Die Orden der Nacht (The Orders of the Night time) (1996), which sees the artist within the Savasana yoga pose, aka corpse pose, beneath big black sunflowers that appear to soak up the sunshine. Die Milchstraße (The Milky Method) (1985-87), from earlier than this journey, would appear to characterize his regular instincts, that are to make an enormous ruined battlefield after which imbue it with some mythology. Right here the celebrities are being siphoned down into the ditch by way of skinny metallic tubes. Maginot (1982-2013) feels on this vein.

Probing the impact that the Mississippi had on him, we must always take a look at the 2 works devoted to beat poet Gregory Corso, whose strains about everlasting life have been the idea for the title of this exhibition. Changing into the ocean, for Gregory Corso (2024), which nonetheless has a dry and puckered texture, suggests the ocean remains to be a battlefield. I do like that one of many supplies is “sediment of electrolysis.” It’s attainable that this journey up the Mississippi was the place the artist first got here to configure some form of optimism into his intensely postwar landscapes. Für Gregory Corso (2024) sees a contented girl within the evening sky above the waves, apparently the spirit that lives on amid all this desolation.

“Anselm Kiefer: Changing into the Sea” is on view on the Saint Louis Artwork Museum by January 25, 2026.

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