Anselm Kiefer

Hong Kong

White Cube Hong Kong currently presents an exhibition of new work by celebrated international artist Anselm Kiefer, his first in China.

Kiefer shows a new body of work that continues the major themes of history, landscape and myth in his work, including new large-scale landscape paintings and lead and steel sculptures. The exhibition’s title, Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, is knowingly ironic. It refers both to the epic, blooming landscapes of these pictures but also to a common misquotation in the West of a well-known phrase pronounced by Chairman Mao in 1957 which, while ostensibly encouraging cultural plurality, led to the deaths of millions and the final curtailment of any and all forms of dissent.

The new paintings in this exhibition relate to a series that Kiefer began in 2000, using landscapes from the photographs that he had taken on his travels through China in 1993. These works, however, are more generic since the landscapes are based on a trip the artist made to the Auvergne region of France during springtime, a mountainous area in full bloom. These monumental paintings depict bountiful fields of flowers thickly painted in neutral colours, suggesting natural profundity and fertility but also entropy, as the display seems just past its point of perfection. Sunflowers, poppies and other flowers sit atop a mass of tangled stems, stalks and foliage which have been partly ruined – a dissolving mass of plant matter that holds the possibility of its imminent collapse. In some paintings the figure of Mao can be seen either painted within the landscape, emerging from the flowers his hand in a beckoning salute or, in some cases – for example in Laßt tausend Blumen blühen (2012) – painted on a section of canvas placed either above the central panel or on one side.

White Cube Hong Kong

May 16th – August 25th, 2012
50 Connaught Road Central
Central, Hong Kong
China

Calendar