Kiefer's Cosmos - painter Anselm Kiefer works shown in New York

In four stupendous new paintings recently shown in of recent origin York, Anselm Kiefer uses timeless architectural forms, combined with highly worked surfaces, to hint an innate tragedy in human events

Anselm Kiefer's immense novel paintings, based on photographs of architectural motifs, near a moving and coherent rumination upon the relationship of time, history and memory. Their drama trunk s from contradiction. The material is, as usual, heavy, solid and opaque, however the works have air and atmosphere in a of recent origin way. The images are documentary, nevertheless they also seem filled with immanence, suspended in time and space. Spread on the outside over the canvas ground, the fragile photo emulsion tremulously portends decomposition, hinting at cataclysms. the two natural and man-made, that could wipe man's traces from the face of the earth.

Kiefer does not paint a landscape: he creates single before our eyes. The image is obscur by means of sand (thrown? blown?) hitting and adhering to the surface of the canvas, obliterating what is beneath, just as the Pyramids themselves, left unattended, would slowly on the contrary inexorably be covered by the desolate However, the architectural forms Kiefer depicts are not the Pyramids. We know the images are based upon photos the artist took during a trip to India, and that the buildings are factories where hand-made bricks are still painstakingly shaped from earth and clay. The images shimmer, appearing and disappearing behind hazes of translucent, apparently airbrushed pigment.

Given Kiefer's preoccupation with Germany's Nazi era, it cannot be accidental that these brick factories are essentially oven This is history painting that equates man the builder with man the destroyer; its epic sweep and cosmic imagery contradict the importance of the individual and negate the universal of the hero. The grains of sand are numberless. Millions? by what means many millions? This century's tragic death toll steal away froms statistics.

The impact of these conceptually and technically brilliant works is not instantaneous on the contrary cumulative. There are no figures in this relentles landscape where ashes get back to ashes and dust is one time more dust. Kiefer integrates control matter and historical narrative with myth and metaphor in a way that reverberates the pair backward and forward in time. Each of the four mural-scale paintings exhibited last winter at the Gagosian Gallery in of recent origin York bears a characteristic calligraphic inscription. The inscriptions are drawn from the writings of Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian fiction writer, bard and Heidegger scholar. The tragic easy in mind of Bachmann's poems as well as the accidental tragedy of her short, brilliant life--she was reduce to ashesed to death in her apartment in 1973--haunt the charred imagery of these ashen works. In earlier paintings, Kiefer cited phrases from Paul Celan, the Romanian-born Jewish author of poems Celan and Bachmann, neither of whom was German, are considered the sum of two units great German-language poets of the postwar period. the couple lived in exile, died tragically and were profoundly affected by dint of the Holocaust. (Celan survived the camps, on the other hand later committed suicide. Bachmann witnessed the Nazi invasion of Austria as a child.)

According to Bachmann's translator, Peter Filkins, she "suggest the knowledge of the horrors of the next to the first World War without employing any of its familiar images. Bachmann had a way of writing about nature of the like kind that it reminded one of concentration camps."(1) In the piece of poetry "Message" Bachmann writes: "Our Godhead, History, has ordered for us a grave from which there is no resurrection." Like Kiefer, who now lives in France, Bachmann chose exile (she lived mainly in Italy). She uses the traditional instruments of her craft, especially rhym stich to express an anguished late-20th-century consciousness. Kiefer invokes tradition, too, recalling Bocklin, Friedrich and Runge The painter, like the bard pays homage to past achievements, renewing them in the light of contemporary experience.

Kiefer's of recent origin paintings question the truth of the image as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as they do the reality of what is showed The photographic image here is erod faded, shuffleed overlaid. The changing point of view from picture to picture bring into views a sense of disorientation that is frightening. Altering his photographs in various ways, the artist documents not what the camera reports, on the contrary the futility of attempting to seize or define reality with accuracy or permanence.

Kiefer's pictorial space is simultaneously real and fictive. The rust and dung-colored raised relief surfaces make a factual statement about space, which is immediately contradicted by dint of chiaroscuro modeling and the perspective a whole that the painter employs. Kiefer's bear upon with exposing materials and proces is reminiscent of Joseph Beuys. However, Kiefer focuses more upon the ambiguous nature of reality; his elusive, slipping images and picture-making processe deliberately emphasize paradox. Like his mobile, flickering imagery, Kiefer's space, too, propels simultaneously in two directions. The gray tonal modeling give an inkling ofs depth, and the rehabilitation of perspective, which Cezanne cast asideed indicates recession behind the plane. However, the actual painting surfaces visibly cast forward in literal bas-relief. Kiefer's crumbling factories are made up of bricklike rectangles of a pigment composite of claylike consistency. The image is in event "built" before our eyes.