Anselm Kiefer- Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen

From the 11th March to the 9th of April, the White Cube Gallery in Hoxton Square is showcasing an exhibition of work from German artist Anselm Kiefer. His work is characterised by texture and vivid tactility, by reusing found materials on thickly painted canvases, creating work, which is halfway between a painting and a sculpture. This exhibition, titled ‘Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen’, meaning The Waves of Sea and Love, features 24 panoramic seascapes in the main gallery of the White Cube. The title is taken from a play by 19th Century poet and writer, Franz Grillparzer. “The play re-tells the classical myth of Hero, the Greek priestess, and Leander, her lover, who swam the Hellespont every night to be with Hero but eventually drowned. The myth has inspired numerous writers and artists over the centuries, from Marlowe and Keats to Rubens and Turner, but Kiefer’s relationship to it is less explicit, more allusive. As in so much of his work, poetry and mythology are the entry point to a complex layering of reference, meaning and experience”.
Each seascape in the gallery centres on a black and white photograph of the sea, transformed and superimposed with paint splatters, texture and sometimes rust. Gynaecological instruments have been pasted on these canvases,  “a foreign body that is at once disruptive and unifying, sterile and fertile. The Sublime is reworked with subtle reference to humankind’s atavistic relationship to the sea – a site of terror and awe and yet the place from which all life evolved”.
In the gallery on the second floor, a room features smaller paintings of similar seascapes but with himself featuring in the photographs of the sea. “The title ‘I hold all the Indias in my hand’ is a quotation from the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo in which he writes of a man holding a ring that bears the portrait of his lover. The image acts like a mandala, a focus for meditation, and through intense contemplation of it he gains a burgeoning consciousness of the universe and the poet’s place within it. ‘I hold the starry plains of heaven,’ he writes, ‘I hold all Indias in my hand”.