Film still from Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, 2010 Directed by Sophie Fiennes.

Sophie Fiennes’ film Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, is a meditative and mostly wordless portrait of Anselm Kiefer’s studio in Barjac in France. Keifer left his native Germany in 1993 and took over a derelict silk factory, La Ribaute, in the South of France. It was an industrial landscape surrounded by woods, which Kiefer transformed by excavating subterranean passages, caverns and tunnels to create an ever-evolving architectural space.

Anselm Kiefer and Sophie Fiennes, La Ribeaute, photo by Anton Corbijn

This organic, constantly shifting personal universe extends over 35 hectares of land with a concrete ampitheater, pools and crypts running underneath the studios and pavilions which house his paintings. Kiefer appears very controlling of the way his art is displayed in these customized pavilions that create little ‘homes’ for his paintings and yet, these installations remain unfinished, and their future susceptibility to the forces of nature are integral to their ultimate form and evolution.

One interesting vignette is a short interview in which the artist muses about his inspirations. Boredom, he says, is something only children face. Kiefer has been inspired by the Zohar in his recent works, and here he mentions the character of Lilith in the bible. Here is an excerpt of Lilith from Isaiah 34: “Her nobles shall be no more, nor shall kings be proclaimed there; all her princes are gone. Her castles shall be overgrown with thorns, her fortresses with thistles and briers. She shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches. Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; There shall Lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest. There the hoot owl shall nest and lay eggs, hatch them out and gather them in her shadow…”

The passage illustrates Kiefer’s willingness to let his artworks, which are momentarily shaped by human hand from mud, ash, earth and metals, revert to their Edenesque state of wildness.

Film still from Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, 2010 Directed by Sophie Fiennes.

Ampitheatre - Film still from Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, 2010 Directed by Sophie Fiennes.

Kiefer Painting - Film still from Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, 2010 Directed by Sophie Fiennes.

Film still from Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, 2010 Directed by Sophie Fiennes.

Sophie Fienne on location2 2008 photo by Remco Schorr

OVER YOUR CITIES THE GRASS WILL GROW August 10-23, at Film Forum, West Houston Street (W. of 6th Avenue), New York City

ANSELM KIEFER Fitzcarraldo, 2010 Oil, emulsion, acrylic, shellac, ash, thorn bushes, resin ferns, synthetic teeth, lead and rust on canvas in glass and steel frames 130 11/16 x 302 3/8 x 13 13/16 inches (332 x 768 x 35 cm) © Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

To experience Anselm Kiefer’s new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery is to enter a monochromatic forest with walls of flaking, mud-encrusted canvases that transport us into a world at times foreboding, at others, shamanic and mystical.

Anselm Kiefer speaking at 92Y photo: K.Lala, 2010

Merkaba, 2010 - © Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Anselm Kiefer speaking at 92Y photo: K.Lala, 2010

Through this organic web of ‘memories,’ both historical and personal, Kiefer evokes a sense of past. Faded photographs on lead plates hint at a militaristic epoch in which Kiefer appears making the Hitlergruß, the Nazi salute in front of historically significant landmarks that deliberately confront a troubled time.

During his conversation at 92Y with curator and critic Sir Norman Rosenthal (who co-curated Sensation during his tenure at London’s Royal Academy), Kiefer said that his painted photographs incorporate several levels of histories. “The photograph is a moment. It’s interesting to combine the two because there is a tension between a moment and history.”

The artist seemed unruffled by much of the interviewer’s rhetorical line of questioning. When Rosenthal remarked that his paintings evoked graveyards, Kiefer replied that they were in fact more about the living, that the past was a story written by the living:  “Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal and Terence Koh keeping each other company at Gagosian Gallery. Photo K.Lala 2010

In some of the paintings in relief hang empty dresses that retain memories of the shapes of their owners, implying the absence of the physical body (arguably recalling the discarded clothes of Holocaust victims). Kiefer is drawn to the grandness of decay, the remnants of lost cultures, things left in the wake of civilization that implicate us.

Kiefer has studied the Zohar, and weaves in elements from the text on Jewish mysticism. In several glass vitrines, some 20 feet tall, the artist references Kabbalah, and the Sefiroth, symbolizing the energetic systems of the body. These monolithic shrines of glass and steel contain assemblages of decaying matter; lead, ash, organic remains, burnt texts, snakeskin, dresses and an aircraft’s fuselage – that together construct an arcane narrative.

Rosenthal, citing Kant, asked at one point, “Do you think art is a moral imperative?” Kiefer responded by saying that morals change, so art can at one moment be moral, at another, amoral. What is imperative is relative to survival.

For Kiefer, the creative process is the most important act, and many of his paintings remain unfinished. “Do you know when a painting is finished?” asked Rosenthal. “Sometimes I know… sometimes I need the money,” Kiefer quipped.

Indeed, such quick deflections might come naturally, as the artist claims to have had studied sophism in his early years. But Kiefer admitted that back then, “I knew, that I knew nothing.” “If the intellect isn’t combined with emotion,” he went on, “then it becomes abstract.”

Julian Schnabel, who attended Kiefer’s talk, later discussed Kiefer with Rosenthal, and said, that in his own view, he did not separate intellect and feelings. Asked what he thought of Kiefer’s show, Schnabel replied glibly, “I thought it was pretty good.” He felt that he and Kiefer both have the soul of a six year old.

For Kiefer the connection to his art is spiritual. “I grew up in a forest. It’s like a room. It’s protected. Like a cathedral… it is a place between heaven and earth.”

“Life is an illusion,” concluded Kiefer. “I am held together in the nothingness by art.”

Next Year in Jerusalem, Installation view Photo by Rob McKeever - © Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Anselm Kiefer – Next Year in Jerusalem – November 6 – December 18, 2010, Gagosian Gallery 555 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011

View of the The Louvre's Ceiling by Cy Twombly Photo: Christophe Ena

Giotto's star-ceiling in the Cappella Scrovegni, Padua.

Cy Twombly’s newly commissioned ceiling at the Louvre in Paris is monumental in scale, and covers more than 350 square meters. It was painted with the assistance of several artists and apprentices in a warehouse outside Paris before being affixed like wallpaper to the ceiling of the Salle des Bronzes. Looking up one sees an immense blue sky, painted with spheres and white insets inscribed with the names of leading Greek sculptors from the 4th century: Cephisodotus, Lysippus, Myron, Phidias, Polyclitus, Praxiteles and Scopas. The round shapes appear like shields, planets, or coins, while the blue background evokes either the sky or the sea.

Cy Twombly is the third contemporary artist invited to install a permanent work at the Louvre. He follows in the footsteps of a long lineage of artists including Le Brun, Delacroix, Ingres that have been honored in this tradition.  In the 20th century, the invitation has been extended to Georges Braque, (who has painted a ceiling with black birds against a starry midnight-blue sky ) and more recently to François Morellet, and in 2007 to Anselm Kiefer.

Though Twombly is American born, he has been living in Italy since 1959, and this work not only evokes the spirit of the Mediterranean, but also the colors of Chinese prints, and the lapis lazuli paint used by Italian Renaissance artist Giotto – who the artist says he has also been inspired by.

By Kiša Lala