Will Anselm Kiefer ever overcome his limited American reputation as Germany's premier history painter, working the nation through its National Socialist past? This sixty-work survey will provide US viewers with a metaphysical take on the artist's practice. The exhibition traces the dialogue between heaven and earth in Kiefer's oeuvre, from one of his earliest artist's books, The Heavens, 1969, to recent engagements with Jewish mysticism.
One by one, the famous "Homage to the Square" paintings are easily dismissed as Albers-the-artist's brainy illustrations of Albers-the-teacher's color theories. En masse, they confound more than explain. Curators Weiermair and Vecchi assemble thirty-five "Homages" along with some forty other paintings and photo collages for Albers's first monographic show in Italy.
The show places about eighty-five drawings alongside both her early fabric appendages, which extend their wearers' body parts, and four recent machine installations that perform repetitive bodily tasks.
This Rebecca Horn exhibition promises to prove that it is not mere platitude to speak of pencil and paper as an extension of the artist's body. The show places about eighty-five drawings alongside both her early fabric appendages, which extend their wearers' body parts, and four recent machine installations that perform repetitive bodily tasks. Though bios of Horn routinely mention the year she spent in a sanatorium recovering from lung damage after working with polyester and fiberglass, the artist's own body has remained a refreshingly puzzling absence in her work.