Anselm Kiefer - Next Year in Jerusalem

There is a special border, the border between art and life that often shifts deceptively. Yet, without this border, there is no art. In the process of being produced, art borrows material from life, and the traces of life still shine through the completed work of art. But, at the same time, the distance from life is the essence, the substance of art. And, yet, life has still left its traces. The more scarred the work of art is by the battles waged on the borders between art and life, the more interesting it becomes. --Anselm Kiefer

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “Next Year in Jerusalem,” Anselm Kiefer’s first exhibition in New York since 2002.

“Next Year in Jerusalem” invokes an utopian refrain from the end of the Passover Seder, a Judaic tradition that idealizes a return to Israel where all believers can celebrate the rites of renewal.

The exhibition centers around the installation Occupations, which transforms Kiefer’s provocative series of photographs from 1969 in which he appears making the Nazi salute (Hitlergruß) in front of European sites of historical significance. Seventy-six newly printed photographs are mounted first on lead, then on burlap shrouds, within a partially enclosed steel container. In this imposing structure, which offers multiple points of entry, each photograph becomes a translucent scrim where the image is barely legible. With this unprecedented new form, Kiefer integrates, expands, and regenerates imagery and techniques from earlier phases of his oeuvre.

Kiefer has transformed the space that surrounds Occupations into a labyrinth of glass and steel vitrines, some more than twenty feet high. Each vitrine is a tableau of organic and inorganic material -- cotton dresses, palms, bushes, an airplane fuselage, and burned books. They appear like ancient reliquaries with titles inscribed directly on the glass. In these works, Kiefer inverts the historical and ritualistic connotations of his chosen materials, particularly lead. In Valentinus, named for the second century Gnostic theologian, lead buckets and chains are juxtaposed with synthetic diamonds and wire; in Sefiroth a disembodied white dress is molded to an invisible female figure and surrounded by glass shards and numbered glass disks, in reference to one of the ten Kabbalistic markers of spiritual presence.

In large paintings hung around the perimeter of the gallery, Kiefer has collaged photographs and other elements to canvas, integrating diverse landscapes including mountains, sea and forest. In Mount Tabor, barren fields lead to the site of Christian pilgrimage where the Transfiguration is said to have occurred. Entrance to Paradisecomprises four panels encased in glass and steel that contain lead and fragments of thornbush on canvas. The cumulative effect is one of a mythical refuge or forest where materials are recast as transcendent elements on an epic scale.

Kiefer's monumental archive of human memory gives overt material presence to a broad range of cultural myths and metaphors, from the Old and New Testaments to the Kabbalah, from ancient Roman history to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Célan. By constructing elaborate scenographies that fuse art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history, the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos, and the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual amid the ongoing destruction of the world.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by cultural historian and novelist Marina Warner and Anselm Kiefer’s own writings.

Anselm Kiefer - Next Year in Jerusalem