Arte New

ANSELM KIEFER – Palazzo Ducale – Venice

To celebrate the 1,600th anniversary of the founding of Venice, there could not have been a more suitable artist than Anselm Kiefer: curated by Gabriella Belli and Janne Sirén, the exhibition at the Doge's Palace is one of the must-see appointments to experience the thrill-now increasingly rare in contemporary art-of a real wow effect. Like it for its disproportionate textural and visual charge, for that slightly sadistic but fully in control power that seems to twist the limit of painting, or dislike it for the same, identical reasons, Kiefer's art represents a moment of no return, rather than arrival.

To enter such an overloaded environment as the Scrutiny Room, in comparison with the 33 monumental canvases on the ceiling and the cornucopia of decorative apparatuses that still emanate the power of the Serenissima, would be an impossible feat for any living contemporary artist. But not for Kiefer, who, with his cycle of enormous paintings created especially for this project during 2020 and 2021, succeeds in measuring the expressive capacity of the architecture of the Doge's Palace and its enormous history with monumental and distinctly Central European impetus of a painting that, by now, is no longer about the act of painting but about the act of breaking in. On the other hand, Gesamtkunstwerk, total art, surrounding and involving senses and spaces, is an ever-active myth.

Philosophical and literary references have always been central to the understanding of Anselm Kiefer's work. The exhibition takes the title Anselm Kiefer. These writings, when burned, will finally give some light (Andrea Emo) from the words of the Venetian philosopher Andrea Emo (1901-1983), whose writings Kiefer first encountered six years ago. Indeed, Kiefer's artistic method has deep consonances with Andrea Emo's philosophical thought.

In the installation at the Doge's Palace, Anselm Kiefer also reflects on Venice's unique position placed between North and South and its interaction between East and West, finding equally significant connections between these different cultures, the city's history and the text of Goethe's tragic work, Faust: Part Two (1832).

"Sometimes it happens that there is a convergence between past and present moments, and when these meet one experiences something like stillness in the hollow of the wave about to break. Having originated in the past but basically belonging to something more than it, these moments are as much a part of the present as of the past, and what they generate is most important" A. Kiefer

Palazzo Ducale – Piazza S. Marco 1 - Venice - Italy
March 26th – Oct 29th, 2022