'Anselm Kiefer transforms the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Pantin into a cathedral of living matter' Exhibition review by Thibaut Wychowanok

By Thibaut Wychowanok

This summer in Pantin, Anselm Kiefer is transforming the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery into a cathedral of living, turgid and oversized matter. With 'Nymphäum', a series dedicated to nymphs, the German artist blends, with his characteristic power, mythology, contemporary ruins and shifting landscapes into monumental works where gold, ash, lead and paint seem to be in a constant state of flux. A volcanic exhibition running until 25 October 2026.

Like a nave that has survived an ancient fire, the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Pantin has the air of a cathedral in the aftermath of a catastrophe, offering the eye a sublime abyss that draws you in and engulfs you. The twenty or so canvases by Anselm Kiefer are not meant to be viewed head-on: one moves through them as if through ruins still warm to the touch.

The white light of the space collides with their thick surfaces, lost in the crevices of paint, in the strata of material, in its wounds, in the streaks of oxidation and the fragments of lead encrusted like fossilised shards. With the exhibition “Nymphäum”, Kiefer transforms the Pantin space into a telluric sanctuary, a place where Greek mythology rises to the surface in the form of ash, mud, gold and memory.

Ruined cityscapes

In vast urban landscapes, skyscrapers with windows covered in gold leaf emerge from an almost organic chaos of vegetation. The buildings seem to be both growing and decaying. Black branches criss-cross the façades like veins. The gold glitters amidst deep greens, tar-black and rusty browns with a Byzantine, almost liturgical quality. Corinna Thierolf draws parallels between these paintings and Klimt’s The Kiss (1908–1909); one is also reminded of the mosaics of Ravenna or certain icons worn away by time. But in Kiefer’s work, light saves nothing: it illuminates the ruins.

One of the most unsettling canvases depicts a female face floating above a nocturnal city. The face is barely visible, suspended in a mass of foliage and green matter. It takes time for it to emerge. Then it disappears once more into the depths of the painting. Here, the painting acts as an unstable memory. Kiefer does not depict the nymphs; he ensures that they haunt the surface.

An immersive spatial arrangement of the works

This sensation pervades the entire exhibition. The two immense painted screens play a decisive role here. In Kiefer’s work, the painting literally ceases to be a frontal surface and becomes a mobile architecture, a device that fractures and recomposes space. The viewer no longer moves in front of the works but around them, as in an ambulatory. 

The hinged panels reveal blind spots, recesses, and areas where things appear and disappear, perfectly capturing this notion of the nymph as an elusive figure. Corinna Thierolf writes that “the painter seems to want to offer the nymphs a fleeting refuge, commensurate with their transience”. This idea takes on a physical form in the Pantin space: the screens create temporary chambers, precarious sanctuaries in the middle of the nave.

One of the most striking has a back entirely gilded. Seen from a distance, it acts almost like a Byzantine altarpiece or a fragment of a monumental icon transplanted into the gallery’s industrial space. But on closer inspection, the gold ceases to be pure; it is scratched, brushed, soiled, eaten away by black halos and ghostly silhouettes. The faces seem to float beneath the metallic surface like apparitions trapped within the material. The panel reflects the cold light from the skylight whilst drawing the eye in. It brings to mind certain medieval gold backgrounds, but also something more spectral: a burnt-out screen, an image almost erased. 

Die Oreaden and the memory of disaster

In Die Oreaden (2025), a vast panorama measuring nearly eight metres, female faces appear at the foot of a vast mountainous crater. The sky bathes the whole scene in an apocalyptic light. The heads emerge from the material like archaeological masks still trapped in the mud. Kiefer brings catastrophe and birth into coexistence. The crater becomes both tomb and womb. One is reminded of the artist’s childhood memories of playing in the ruins of a devastated Germany. In his work, the landscape always retains the memory of disaster.

This memory also runs through the seascapes. In a vast canvas dominated by deep blues and metallic blacks, a reclining figure floats on the surface of the water beneath an almost liquid cosmic sky. The blue pigments seem to have been poured directly onto the canvas before being burnt or corroded. The surface reflects light like oil. The body appears caught in a process of dissolution, as if returning to the very element that produced it. Here again, the painting acts as a cycle of transformation: nothing is stable, everything returns to matter.

Matter as a trace of time

Kiefer works the canvas as one might work the earth. Every surface bears the traces of time: oxidation, cracks, deposits, drips. Matter becomes physical memory. Corinna Thierolf rightly draws parallels with Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings (1977–1978); yet in Kiefer’s work, the chemical reaction seems imbued with a sense of historical gravity. The painting does not celebrate the surface: it wears it down, consumes it, makes it age before our eyes.
This resistance is perhaps the true subject of the exhibition. Even more profoundly, “Nymphäum” affirms an idea that has run through Kiefer’s entire body of work for decades: humanity’s intimate intertwining with the cycles of nature. In his work, human beings never exist separately from the landscape, the earth or the elements. Bodies seem to emerge from the very materials that surround them before slowly returning to them.
Faces appear in the foliage, mountains take on organic forms, architecture becomes overgrown with vegetation, as if nature always eventually reclaimed what human history had attempted to freeze in time. Nothing is stable, nothing is autonomous. Ruins, trees, water, oxidised metals and mythological figures are all part of the same cycle of destruction and rebirth.

Kiefer’s painting: a place where the world continues to grapple with its ghosts

This is precisely what Kiefer’s surfaces bring to life. The layers of paint, the chemical reactions, the deposits and the cracks do not merely serve to produce an image: they give tangible form to time itself. The canvas becomes a ground upon which the traces of human memory and natural forces accumulate. A civilisation disappears, vegetation returns; one figure fades, another emerges from the material.

The nymphs thus become less mythological figures than manifestations of this profound continuity between the living, the mineral and human history. Kiefer’s nymphs are not decorative figures; they embody an archaic force that survives through the centuries, despite human destruction.
They traverse wars, industrial ruins and modern cities. They reappear in the foliage overgrowing skyscrapers, in silhouettes dissolved in water, in faces slowly rising from the material. In Kiefer’s work, painting remains, time and again, a place where the world continues to grapple with its ghosts.

“Nymphäum”, exhibition until 25 October 2026, at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Pantin.

(Translated from French)