Regeneration
Until 13 august 2017
Nova Southeastern University Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale
A survey of the German artist Anselm Kiefer is due to kick off Regeneration, a new series at the Nova Southeastern University (NSU) Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale that examines artists’ responses to the Second World War. The exhibition features around 50 artist books, works on paper, paintings and sculptures from 1969 to 2013, drawn from the collection of the Palm Beach-based hedge fund manager Andrew Hall and his wife Christine.
Kiefer, born during the final days of the war, was among the first generation of Germans to confront the horrors of Nazism and national complicity as historical fact. According to Bonnie Clearwater, the museum’s director and chief curator, this backdrop (known as Vergangenheitshewältigung, or “coming to terms with the past”), provided his animus from the start.
One of the earliest works in the show is a book of photographic self-portraits staged in front of monuments and sites significant to the rise of National Socialism. Kiefer defied the postwar interdiction on representing symbols of the Third Reich and prodded the viewer to consider where evil is located.
The study of symbols remains a constant in the artist’s work, even as his oeuvre grew to encompass paintings and sculptural installations. It led him to reach further back into history, both German and ancient, to grapple with how mythologies are created and reinforced. Wege der Weltweisheit—die Hermannsschlacht (1978), a 10-ft-wide collage of woodcut portraits of the greatest German minds in philosophy, music and literature, asks how a nation that produced such works could have fallen under the sway of an anti-intellectual, regressive regime.
The roughly chronological layout of the exhibition shows Kiefer stretching for ever more monumental forms and materials to convey the vastness of his inquiry. In the 1970s, he fully embraced a unique Neo-Expressionist idiom, and by the 1980s he had begun to incorporate industrial found objects and organic materials into his paintings.
The show includes two epic canvases from 2005-06, among Kiefer’s most grandly realised works (Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem and Nachricht vom Fall Trojas). These panoramic, scorched-earth landscapes, with their high horizons, have “the effect of really inserting the viewer right into the scene”, Clearwater says. “We are not on the outside. We’re being implicated.” In contrast to these monumental views—and perhaps surprising for viewers less familiar with Kiefer’s early works—are several small paintings of transcendent beauty also included in the show, such as the lyrical, Emil Nolde-like watercolour Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter (The art almost does not drown, 1975).
To complement the historical overview offered by the NSU show, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, in Miami’s Wynwood neighbourhood, is showcasing Kiefer for the second year in a row. The spotlight is on a newly acquired sculptural installation that has never been shown before. Drawing its title from Goethe’s Faust, Steigend steigend sinke nieder (Rising, rising, falling down, 2009-12) joins several other sculptures by Kiefer at the warehouse.
The Miami-based collector Martin Margulies and the collection’s curator, Katherine Hinds, saw the work in Kiefer’s studio in France, and moved to buy it for the collection. The warehouse’s entrance had to be redesigned to accommodate it. Consisting of stalks of white suspended over a base of broken concrete and earth, it suggests regrowth and regeneration—a small but significant triumph over death and destruction.
• Regeneration series: Anselm Kiefer from the Hall Collection, Nova Southeastern University Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, until 13 August 2017, and Anselm Kiefer, the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, until 29 April 2017