Dear Shaded Viewers,
Today my friend Vincent Gagliostro and I decided to take a break, for a few hours, and get a bit of inspiration by taking in the current Anselm Kiefer show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. Put it on your must see list even though it is not exactly around the corner. The Pantin location is for collectors with helicopters and chauffeurs but you can take the line 5 to Eglise de Pantin and then it is about a 15 minute walk to the Galerie but, it is worth it. I’m pretty speechless to describe the work, you just want to touch it, of course you can not and there are signs around reminding you, don’t even think about it.
Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition was the inauguration of the Pantin gallery five years ago. The current exhibition Fur Andrea Emo is a selection of twenty paintings along with three sculptures, which reflect the sedimentation of memory cherished by the artist. These sculptures encapsulate a spiritual connection between several elements. Looking at them is like an archaeological dig, they appear as many fossils or artefacts to unearth, as many micro-fictions to decipher. It’s about the artists process of destruction and regeneration. By pouring molten lead, Ansel Kiefer obliterates the original image and brings to life his own work in a radically iconoclastic gesture.
The exhibition is dedicated to Andrea Emo (1901-1983) an Italian philosopher whose nihilist thinking has fuelled the development of his work. A solitary thinker who has chosen the path of reclusion and self-exclusion from the academic world, Andrea Emo is an important ffigure in new metaphysics. Emo’s approach to time is through memory: “there is nothing new except in recollection…thenew arises out of us, ourselves the future if we can relinquish it.” Anselm Kiefer finds in Andrea Emo’s philosophy an echo to his own questions. Andrea Emo writes: “the deed is the destruction of pictures, their death, their sleep, their burial place, that they require in order to rise again”, while Anselm in his diary says “you’ve come to realize that a picture always erases the immediately preceding one, that it’s a matter of constant disposal and rebirth”.
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany and lives and works in Paris.
Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin
https://www.ropac.net/artist/anselm-kiefer
