Anselm Kiefer review – terrifying odyssey through a cursed world

White Cube Bermondsey, London
In monumental, vertiginous landscapes encrusted with mud and twigs and bloody axes, Kiefer confronts the mystery of existence and the enduring horror of the Holocaust

What’s bugging Anselm Kiefer? At 74, he is not only acclaimed and successful, but bubbling over with a creative energy. It flows with the unceasing power of the Rhine through his latest outpouring of 46 monumental new artworks – it’s easy to picture a few Rhinemaidens swimming about. But, at the end, you feel bereft and devastated. Kiefer comes on like a Wagnerian showman only to collapse in unshakeable, incurable melancholy. His horror vacui is real and he knows it: all this art is just a way of putting off that final confrontation with the void.

Kiefer has found a new way to represent nature for our age of climate crisis. His new paintings are startling apocalyptic visions of a death-infected earth. They make landscape so immediate, you almost feel twigs crunch underfoot and catch your breath turning to steam in a snowy wood. Then you see an axe in the undergrowth, its rusty blade the colour of blood. The boundless tangle of nature has no chance against the iron edge of human violence.

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