""Spirit is Life. It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea." -Gregory Corso ST. LOUIS - At 2,340 miles, the "mighty" Mississippi River borders no fewer than eight American states. Missouri is among them, where the city of St. Louis has been the site of both tenacious (and pugnacious) expansionist gusto and, in the wake of midcentury de-industrialization, precipitous decline."
"Becoming the Sea is a sublime instance of Kiefer's inveterate (some might say shameless) Romanticism. Nostalgia for the Rhine River of his childhood flows into homages to the Mississippi as a symbol of both industry and creative freedom; the feminine spirits of the Indigenous North American Anishinaabe and Wabanaki people ebb into a reference to the "Rhinemaidens" of the Wagner opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung);"
"As is often the case for American culture, it takes an outsider to gild our mythos, to redeem the dismissed as truly magnificent. German artist Anselm Kiefer has pulled this off for the Mississippi River and its surrounding territory. Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea, on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum, is the Neo-Expressionist's first major United States museum show in 20 years."
Anselm Kiefer's Becoming the Sea links nostalgia for the Rhine River with homages to the Mississippi, positioning the river as a symbol of industry and creative freedom. The exhibition occupies the Saint Louis Art Museum with five towering, site-specific canvases and 40 works spanning five decades, roughly half produced in the last five years. The works mix Romanticism with references to Indigenous Anishinaabe and Wabanaki feminine spirits, Wagnerian myth, and poets such as Paul Celan and Gregory Corso. Materials include emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis, creating heavily textured, gilded surfaces that evoke history, decay, and transformation.
Read at Hyperallergic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]