A Pilgrimage to Kiefer's Cathedral of Ash

Yesterday we embarked on a pilgrimage to London's White Cube Gallery to view the 'Finnegan's wake' - the new exhibition of work by German artist Anselm Kiefer. 

Passing through the pristine antechamber of the White Cube, all glowing white plaster and polished concrete, felt like approaching some great cathedral.

 Entering the first gallery space, we were plunged suddenly into an ashen underworld. 

Kiefer's large-scale paintings hung on the walls like ancient tomb paintings, muted greys and blackened earth tones layered in his signature impasto style. 

Moving through the exhibition, we wandered as if lost in a labyrinth made of fire and rubble. Images of scorched earth evoked the horrors of Europe's 20th-century history. Other canvases featured more vertiginous and vaulting imagery, but even these more aspirational paintings were rendered in ashen, elegiac tones as if any dream of transcendence was foreclosed. 

Throughout, Kiefer's use of ash, clay, and sediment creates a funereal mood; the upward impulse is ever tethered to, and muted by, the pull of the earth below.

We emerged from Kiefer's dark palette of char and ash, feeling as if we had walked through the aftermath of some great conflagration, a cataclysm registered in the very substance of the work.  

A blackened cathedral built by one who has walked through fire and shadow, and returned to testify.

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