Anselm Kiefer, Walhalla, exhibition review: Kiefer's lack of restrictions is a treacherous position for an artist

Anselm Kiefer can do whatever he wants, which makes his practice feel increasingly incontient, writes Ben Luke
Vastness: Anselm Kiefer’s Walhalla, 2016
Charles Duprat
Ben Luke25 November 2016

So much of this show is initially impressive. It’s trademark Kiefer: vastness and immersiveness, erudition and material richness.

In sculptures, often in glass tanks, fusing the found and the made, and in enormous paintings, the dominant theme is Valhalla, both the Norse afterlife and a monument to great Germans through the ages.

At its best, it’s stirring stuff. A claustrophobic ward of death opens the show: oppressive lead walls and bed after rusted bed with covers hewn from that same toxic material. It’s genuinely eerie, unavoidably evoking contemporary warzones, as do several ominous paintings elsewhere depicting Kiefer’s familiar teetering towers.

But too much else, after its initial impact, is thin. The sculptures, especially, often seem hastily shoved together. Kiefer is in a treacherous position for an artist, in seemingly having no restrictions. He can produce anything he wants at whatever scale and speed he desires. The problem is, he doesn’t seem to be asking enough whether he should.

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So his practice feels increasingly incontinent — his studio the conveyer belt primed to fill the world’s expanding mega-galleries with quasi-profound art monsters.

Until February 12, White Cube; whitecube.com

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