Anselm Kiefer has a very powerful solo exhibition in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg

A painting by Anselm Kiefer. Photos: The State Hermitage Museum

Here you have a good reason to travel to Saint Petersburg: In the State Hermitage Museum you can just now see a very powerful  solo exhibition by the German artist Anselm Kiefer.

The exhibition is a contemporary artist’s dedication to the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov. The exhibition will be seen in the colossal Nikolaevsky hall of the Winter Palace where Kiefer has created about 30 new big paintings.

For Kiefer, poetical production often turns into a starting point: “I think in pictures. Poems help me with this. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In between, without them, I am lost. They are the handholds where something masses together in the infinite expanse”, he describes.

Great paintings are mainly brown and grayish by their colors. They have references to nature or to ships. The name is often Aurora or Untitled. The paint layers are thick and the oil paintings are so fresh that the you can feel the smell in the showroom.

One of the main source of inspiration for Kiefer is world culture in its widest perspective: German history, religious mysticism, antiquity, and Mesopotamian mythology.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in a little German town called Donaueschingen, a few months before the end of the Second World War. Researching the themes of guilt and pain, which paralyzed his generation, Kiefer became one of the first artists who blatantly addressed the topics of Nazism and the Holocaust. 

In Finland at Mänttä Serlachius Museums there was a large and impressive exhibition by Anselm Kiefer in 2015-2016.

Anselm Kiefer, for Velimir Khlebnikov exhibition will continue at the Hermitage museum until third of September.

A painting by Anselm Kiefer. Photos: The State Hermitage Museum