The titan Kiefer arrives in Barcelona: "I only have faith in art, without it I am lost"

For the German artist Anselm Kiefer (Donaueschingen, 1945), considered one of the great creators of the second half of the 20th century, art is like a lifeline. "I only have faith in art, without it I am lost," says Kiefer, as can be read on a wall text at the end of the major exhibition dedicated to him by the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera starting this Friday and running until January 24th, titled The Secret Life of Plants. Anselm Kiefer in the Grothe Collection. With a statement like this, it might seem that Kiefer is having a moment of weakness, but in reality, he is a titanic artist who, since the late 1960s, has addressed the trauma of Nazism with every means at his disposal; and, beyond the Holocaust, he has forged a very broad cosmogony where the Germanic myths of the Nibelungs and Wagnerism, the Old Testament, and the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah converge. Also alchemy, Sumerian and Egyptian cosmologies, the philosophy of Heidegger, the romanticism of Hölderlin and Goethe, and the poetry of Celan and Bachmann. "Kiefer says of himself that he looks, at the same time, towards the past and towards the future, and only art can do that," states the exhibition curator, Walter Smerling.

Kiefer was born two months before the end of the Second World War in the basement of a bombed hospital, and he has often spoken of his intimate relationship with Nazism, which was a taboo when he began to address it. "At school, Nazism was taught as if it were Alexander the Great, as a dry piece of ancient history. And even though my father had been an officer during the war, it was not spoken of at home," recalled Kiefer in an interview. "It is not a question of whether I am a Nazi, but whether I would have been. It is an important thing that we should all know," he said in another interview. "I wanted to find out for myself if art is possible, in some way, after fascism – he added in another conversation. I wanted to see what lies behind the phenomenon of the appearance of fascism, behind its surface, and what the abyss of fascism means to me, because this history is part of reality and also of my own discovery. I wanted to represent the unimaginable that is within me."

An exceptional exhibition

The Secret Life of Plants. Anselm Kiefer in the Grothe Collection, the first major exhibition of the artist in Barcelona, is an exceptional display, because it is one of the first times that the cycle of twenty-three monumental glass cases and six photographs titled Opus Magnum, coming from the collection of the businessman Hans Grothe, dialogues with a series of the artist's paintings. One and the other complement each other. "The glass cases are poetic spaces, we can also call them celestial palaces that function as memory archives –says Smerling–. In a time like today in which knowledge is increasingly stored digitally and invisible networks are organized, it is very important to find these answers, or communications, or poetic ideas. These greenhouses are the analog counterpoints to our digital world".

A very special narrator

Sometimes Kiefer has said that he is a frustrated writer and that the act of narrating is essential to his work. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a display case about the miraculous transfer of the house of the Virgin Mary of Nazareth to the sanctuary of Loreto and the painting of a monstrous eagle evoking the angels who took the house away. But what happens if one does not have so many historical and artistic references? "Kiefer provides 60% of the understanding of the work, while 40% must be provided by the visitors, since they recognize what they see and that incites them to understand it," says the curator. "If you study Kiefer you must be willing to enter it," he adds. "It happens to me and many of my friends that when we enter a Kiefer space our autonomic nervous system is stimulated, and the autonomic system has nothing to do with the mind, but rather it is something we cannot control, and the images, for whatever reason, overwhelm us."

In the interview included in the catalog, Kiefer is particularly elusive when it comes to giving clues to interpret his works. Even so, there are some in the exhibition brochure. Ash can refer to alchemical transformation and, also, to crematoria and the Holocaust. Sunflowers are symbols of the connection between heaven and earth, and straw evokes a vulnerable scenario in the history of humanity. Snakes represent danger, temptation, and sin and, also, regeneration after destruction.

In addition to the display cases, the exhibition includes the cycle of paintings that gives the exhibition its title, which is a tribute to the 17th-century physician, naturalist, and philosopher Robert Fludd, who conceived the world as an interconnected system in which plants, stars, and human consciousness were linked. "How do we treat each other in this time when so many things are happening? Between the stars and humans, between infinity and transience, a space of thought unfolds that Kiefer's art opens again and again. From my perspective, it is he who creates new ideas, even if they are paradoxes, but they are new ideas," says the curator. And the journey ends with the artist's books and an audiovisual where one can see the impressive 40-hectare studio-estate that Kiefer has in Barjac (France).

This exhibition is a milestone in the foundation's trajectory. "We have managed to represent the full complexity of his works, among the display cases, the paintings, the sculptures and the books," states Marga Viza, the director of the foundation's culture area.

Regarding the parallel activities, they include a visit to the Kiefer pavilion of the Sorigué collection, with three monumental paintings, at the Plana del Corb gravel pit. And two months ago, the Hortensia Herrero Museum in Valencia inaugurated a major Kiefer exhibition that displays works such as the monumental Danaë, a reproduction over thirteen meters wide of the interior of the Berlin Tempelhof airport, which hosted the horrors of Nazism.