{"id":329037,"date":"2026-03-14T07:52:18","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T07:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/329037\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T07:52:18","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T07:52:18","slug":"ambitious-and-complex-anselm-kiefers-elektra-at-mona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/329037\/","title":{"rendered":"Ambitious and complex: Anselm Kiefer\u2019s Elektra at Mona"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anselm Kiefer, the German neo-expressionist, is one of the most polarising and enigmatic artists of our time. One does not witness his complex labyrinths from a distance; rather, we walk among ruins, Earth\u2019s encrusted layers, enter the celestial and into the enigma, the repository of human memory.<\/p>\n

Transmitting sacred, gnostic knowledge as well as revelation, his works reveal truth in between the differences: between eschatology and genesis, history and mythology. Crossing historical and literary schemas, his monuments confront the being in human. They map human consciousness to the celestial. Kiefer begins at the site of wreckage. For him, \u201cruins are the beginning\u201d, they are the origin of new ideas.<\/p>\n

Kiefer\u2019s meditations on the Holocaust, annihilation, and theories from Greek and Assyrian religions, Jewish mysticism, cosmology, alchemy and the Kabbalah, as well as philosophy, architecture, string theory, poetry and quantum physics, rewrite memory into a malleable material.<\/p>\n

He is notable for countless large-scale paintings, sculptures, lead books and installations. However, his most impressive masterpiece is his studio \u2013 estate La Ribaute, Barjac, in southern France. Referred to as a\u00a0laboratory or ancient city, Barjac stretches more than 40 hectares, with underground tunnels, an amphitheatre, towers, subterranean spaces, greenhouses and outdoor works.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is nothing that compares to Kiefer\u2019s Barjac when it comes to vision, scale, ambition and complexity,\u201d says Georges Armaos, Kiefer\u2019s former artist liaison at Gagosian Gallery.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne could make a parallel with Donald Judd\u2019s creation in Marfa or James Turrell\u2019s Roden Crater project.\u201d<\/p>\n

The colossal, multi-level amphitheatre at La Ribaute is the basis for Kiefer\u2019s latest installation at Mona, titled Elektra. The museum\u2019s founder, David Walsh, had wanted Kiefer to re-create elements of his studio since he first visited it four years before Mona opened. The original budget for the new wing at Mona, developed primarily to house Elektra, was $11 million. The final cost is more than $100\u00a0million.<\/p>\n

Designed by Australian architect Nonda Katsalidis, Mona\u2019s most distinctive feature is its labyrinthine network of tunnels, voids and passages. The architecture is critical to invoking disorientation and descension into the underworld. Katsalidis, who worked with Kiefer on Elektra, says: \u201cEvery aspect of Kiefer\u2019s amphitheatre in Barjac is replicated, even the defects, the dust, stains and accidents. Kiefer said to me, \u2018Just build it as it is.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a monumental commission by Mona. Within Kiefer\u2019s ruins of remembrance, we encounter fragmented collective and personal histories while questioning the process of recollection itself.<\/p>\n

Analogous to an Indian stepwell or an inverted ziggurat, entering Kiefer\u2019s ruin at Mona evokes a sense of reclaiming a lost civilisation. It\u2019s a momentary illumination of such depth that its resonance resounds through the walls.<\/p>\n

Elektra is made from cast concrete and shown together with three overwhelming, large-scale paintings, as well as his celebrated Woman of Antiquity bride sculptures.<\/p>\n

Time bends into overlapping memories and co-existing temporalities as the tomb-like labyrinths and light voids oscillate the viewer between weight and emptiness. These connections or diversions within the maze either psychologically locate the viewer or orientate memory within space. \u201cIt\u2019s like the book The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which is part real and part imaginary,\u201d Kiefer told me in an earlier interview. \u201cFirst, you think it\u2019s a real tunnel; then it becomes a spiritual tunnel. It takes you from one place to the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other works or relics \u2013 archival lead-photographs suspended from the ceiling like film reels, elongated sunflowers, stones, glass shards with encrypted celestial coordinates \u2013 are entrapped around the tunnels. These surreal and hallucinatory moments are cryptically perplexing, rendering a feedback loop of interconnected synapses and rhizomatic networks.<\/p>\n

Reaffirming Kiefer\u2019s belief that stones are living entities possessing spiritual consciousness and ancestral memory, the raw geological boulders at the amphitheatre\u2019s crossroad serve as an anchor throughout the installation. These stones balance a similitude: as co-existing coordinates between matter and memory, between mind and celestial. Recalling Giulio Camillo\u2019s 16th century memory theatre, Elektra abstractly references the mnemonic architectural system \u2013 the method of loci, constructed to locate human knowledge in relation to the cosmos.<\/p>\n

With a foreboding entropy, the painting Die Lebenden und die Toten (The Living and the Dead) (2019), based on an original photograph of a monumental 700-seat Aula Magna at Fribourg University in Switzerland, suggests an exchange between scorched wood sticks and a deserted auditorium. Part of the series Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot (2019), this work reveals Kiefer\u2019s interest in quantum physics while also proposing that perhaps reality is made from interconnected vibrating strings.<\/p>\n

Continuing a similar inquiry, the Jaipur (2008-19) painting depicts intersecting lines tracing or mapping planetary coordinates with the great 1200-year-old stepwell in India. The title refers to Jaipur\u2019s founder and astronomer, Sawai Jai Singh II (1688-1743).<\/p>\n

The shift from the celestial to human eradication alters the tempo through the painting Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for one\u2019s country) (2018-20), confronting the viewer with Germany\u2019s history, human remnants and the glorification of war. Disintegrating into thick textures \u2013 coal, wood, fabric and acrylic \u2013 the Latin phrase shows Kiefer\u2019s use of language as an instrument to reorientate or obscure historical lineage as layers of co-existing time.<\/p>\n

In the middle of the amphitheatre Kiefer\u2019s majestic bride sculptures Melancholia (2007), Sappho (2007-23) and Paete, non dolet (2007) reclaim history\u2019s representation of women. Melancholia\u2019s head is replaced by a polyhedron form and signifies a tension between order and chaos. The polyhedron, often associated with German Renaissance artist Albrecht D\u00fcrer, also suggests the term melancholia as a historical weight, as well as symbolic of transformation.<\/p>\n

Lead, a material synonymous with Kiefer, is sculpted into illegible book pages in the bride Sappho, redolent of hidden history, as well as a critique on the obliteration and control of knowledge. A toxic material, charged with a corrosion resistance that doesn\u2019t decay, lead, for Kiefer, transmits an auratic quality. As he states in his lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France: \u201cLead is a substance that unaccountably contains in its depth a spark of light, a glimmer that seems to belong to some other world. One beyond our reach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elektra operates as a self-governing entity, reforming ancient memory anew so that we bear witness to our own shadow. It is the being in being, a revelation of humanity\u2019s ability to destroy the very thing it is so anxious to preserve.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a monumental commission by Mona. Within Kiefer\u2019s ruins of remembrance, we encounter fragmented collective and personal histories while questioning the process of recollection itself. For this artist, history is not a fait accompli, it\u2019s not fact. He says: \u201cWho today can say whether or not Homer actually existed? And does it really matter?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n March 14, 2026 as “Into the labyrinth”.<\/p>\n

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