Anselm Kiefer

At Papirøen CC presented For Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit: a large-scale installation by Anselm Kiefer, one of the most important living artists of our time.

Anselm Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures are filled with references to the past. Since he began working as an artist in postwar Germany, he has found inspiration in historical events, literature, poetry, alchemy, astronomy, chemistry, and religion. This installation includes four paintings and four lead sculptures of airplanes. These works, monumental in size, had never been exhibited before the exhibition at CC.

Kiefer has been making lead airplane sculptures since the late 1980s. The pieces in this exhibition, with their battered, war-weary aura, dominated the 1500-square-meter space. The allegorically significant airplanes were juxtaposed and conversed with a series of paintings that measure up to 6.6m in height and 11.4 meters in width. The paintings contain references to photographs the artist took during his travels in the Gobi Desert in 1993 and also to a scene in the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s Book of Franza (1955), in which the title character unsuccessfully seeks solace in the barrenness of the desert.
The multiplicity of references and the diversity of materials can be — although not necessarily should be —interpreted as alluding to the philosophy of Emanationism, which holds that all things flow from and return to one infinite entity.

The exhibition was supported by

Gagosian