Anselm Kiefer: Early Works A 'visceral' exhibition . (This link opens in a new tab).
In 1969, a 24-year-old art student called Anselm Kiefer decided to confront "the amnesia of West Germany's postwar identity" head-on, said Claudia Barbieri Childs in The Art Newspaper. Wearing his father's Wehrmacht greatcoat, which he had found in the attic, he staged a series of performances in which he gave "the banned straight-armed Nazi salute", often in front of "historically charged landscapes and monuments". The resulting images, developed into photo montages, were scandalous – the first significant works in a career dedicated to investigating his country's conflicted historical memory.
A selection of these pictures form the nucleus of this new exhibition dedicated to Kiefer's "challenging" early work. Featuring 45 photographs, paintings, prints and watercolours the now-world-famous artist created between 1969 and 1982, the show contains some hellish imagery: "gaunt helmeted soldiers and storm-tossed U-boat crews, leaf-shorn forests, blood-spattered rivers and objectified nudes". It is an event evocative of "a conflicted time", when Germany began to come to terms with its dark recent past.
Born in 1945, Kiefer was marked by history from the start, said Evgenia Siokos in The Daily Telegraph. The night of his birth, his family home in Donaueschingen in the Black Forest "was destroyed in a bombing raid"; his very existence was "intertwined with the complexities of Germany's evolution as a state". Here, we see the beginnings of his poetic interrogation of "Germanic identity", "from the mythological heroes of the Teutonic age" to the ghoulish leadership of the Third Reich.
A constant source of inspiration is the Nibelungen saga and Wagner's operatic adaptations of it: "Brünhilde - Grane" (1978), for instance, is an "apocalyptic" woodcut depicting the titular warrior queen and her horse "engulfed by flames"; she appears again in an "erotically charged" watercolour that sees her "straddling a flaming woodpile". Yet compelling as all this is, the show is too small to properly express Kiefer's genius. It left me "wanting more".
