Anselm Kiefer: Nymphäum Review of the artist's solo exhibition in Pantin
By Vincent Delaury
Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Pantin hosts 'Nymphäum', a new exhibition by Anselm Kiefer (81). [...] This painting is to be 'tasted', seen, but also smelled. Ophthalmic, haptic, immersive, and olfactory painting. It smells (good) of paint the moment you step into the American-style gallery—it’s massive!—and one can only imagine how many pots, pigments, and tubes of paint were needed to bring this ambitious palimpsest to life. It feels fresh, yet it also seems to date back to the dawn of time. Layer upon layer, did this magma-painting form all by itself? One can dream. What an ideal destiny: exit the painter, who becomes nothing more than its humble servant, its 'groom', helping it give birth without over-directing it, discreetly but surely, caressing it while violating it. And then, from time to time, ladies and gentlemen, it must be consolidated: a retaining staple here, a visible screw head there, to hold together a structure of shreds. Through aggregation, these form the final composite painting (finished yet still 'open to the four winds'), sometimes playing at forward or backward tracking shots via folding screens akin to triptychs, inviting us on a '3D' trip with it. Cool: you travel while practically standing still, just a few steps on an ash-grey, speckled-like floor. [...]
But nothing is artificial or forced. Everything surfaces, everything flows. The painting of Anselm Kiefer, a gold-maker, becomes a construction site, a testing ground where historical affinities—whether conscious or fantasized—sweep in like drafts of air; Kiefer, the captain at the helm, feels like a 'director in paint'. Influences do not dominate: they drift. Like a rough sea, teeming with sunken tales and marine spoils fossilized in Veronese green. [...]
As with Lavoisier, nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. The landscape becomes a face and, conversely, landscapes of blossoming flowers, limbuses, and walnut leaves shivering in the wind morph into landscapes of the soul. Yet Kiefer moves far beyond the figure of Narcissus: like a generous demiurge, he shapes a sort of dialogue between simple mortals and celestial beings. Impression, sunrise… and dark night. 'For me, history is a material, just like landscape or color,' he explains. [...]
As if through a process of revelation unique to Kiefer, the nymph suddenly seems to become incarnate: she is no longer merely the product of a pictorial gesture or a symbolic operation, but an active, almost chemical form—a substance that alters, oxidizes, transforms, and comes into being before the viewer's eyes, varying with their distance and movement in front of these vast relief-paintings. Wavering between apparition and erasure, she—the nymph now turned into a trace, at times a totem sculpted into the very matter—stands out as a figure of pure tension.
At Kiefer’s, the nymphs rise, climbing so high they seem intent on escaping the canvas. Except for one, which plummets straight down (cf. Iphigenie, 2025). Elevator to the gallows? Free fall. A nod to Baselitz, upside down. The ups and downs of life—which is also painting, and vice versa. Or "art and life merged" (as Allan Kaprow put it), to our utter vertigo.
And if you recognize yourself in it even a little, it means the painting has already done its work.
[Translated from French]
