Anselm Kiefer's exhibition at White Cube Mason's Yard got off to a suitably high-powered start last night with artists Rachel Whiteread, Gary Hume, Antony Gormley, Michael Craig-Martin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Tracey Emin joining White Cube's founder Jay Jopling to celebrate Kiefer's new body of work.
Entitled 'Aperiatur terra', the exhibition presents three new paintings in the gallery's lower ground floor, each a vast panoramic landscape whose visceral surface appears strewn with flowers or perhaps on fire, at once apocalyptic and redemptive. Part of the process of making the paintings involves earth being thrown directly onto the canvases which are then left out in the hot sun of the south of France, where Kiefer's studio is, so that the paintings quite literally bake.
On the ground floor is an installation of 18 works entitled 'Palmsonntag', which are hung as a single entity on one wall, with a thirteen-metre palm tree laid on the gallery floor. One of the triggers behind the installation was a visit Kiefer made to Morocco where the palm tree is ubiquitous. Kiefer asked a friend if he could have one of the palm trees in his garden. The palm tree was duly sent to Kiefer's studio and, rich in symbolism, became the focal point of this new series of work.
The title of the exhibition, 'Aperiatur terra', is a quotation from the Book of Isaiah and translates as 'let the earth be opened'. The verse continues: 'and bud forth a saviour and let justice spring up at the same time'. These contrasting themes of destruction and re-creation, violent upheaval and spiritual renewal underpin much of Kiefer's work, which he has described as an attempt 'to create the illusion of sense in a nonsensical world'.
Anselm Kiefer: Aperiatur Terra
26 January - 17 March 2007
White Cube
25-26 Mason's Yard St James's
London, SW1Y 6BU
Anselm Kiefer
Alan Yentob and Tom Phillips
Johnny Shand Kydd and Gary Hume
Lucy Ferry and Bella Freud
Michael Craig-Martin, Nicholas Logsdail and Norman Rosenthal
Michael Clark and Rifat Ozbek
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