Anselm Kiefer’s new “total work” in the Sala dello Scrutinio is an installation that overturns every scheme and takes everyone by surprise, impossible to remain indifferent. Contemporary art forcefully enters the heart of history, in the palace of power of the Serenissima with a series of paintings that interact with one of the most important spaces of the Doge’s Palace: the room where the Doge was elected.
Gabriella Belli
Anselm Kiefer was invited in 2019 by the Venetian Civic Museums Foundation (MUVE) to confront history in a dialogue between past and present, between the paintings of Tintoretto, Andrea Vicentino and Palma il Giovane. “I wanted to create a public art project with Kiefer in the simplest sense of the term: painting as a tool for the community, to question and reflect on the value of art and on how much the sensitivity of this extraordinary artist could have captured and restored us to our present time “writes A, director of the Museums Foundation , in his introductory essay to the work.
Titanic and surprising epiphany
Then the big water of November 2019, the lockdown, the dramatic events in which the world has lived these last two years have overturned all the premises and helped to make the new creation of the German painter the titanic and surprising epiphany that it is. All the complexity of the time we are experiencing manifests itself and completely envelops the viewer in the Sala dello Scrutinio, covered with canvases and transformed into a monumental act of witness, which affirms its identity in the present, with premonitory echoes to the torment caused by every war, but which absorbs symbols and inspiration from the millennial history of the Republic of Leo.
After all, the Kiefer exhibition, in addition to being part of the fifth edition of MUVE Contemporaneo, is directly linked to the celebrations for the 1600th anniversary of the foundation of Venice.
Thirty-three large canvases that make up the installation
For the thirty-three large canvases that make up the installation, Kiefer has chosen an emblematic title “These writings, when burned, will finally give some light”; a quote from the writings of the Venetian philosopher Andrea Emo (1901-1983), reproduced on the canvases that make up the entrance work to the exhibition, in the Sala della Quarantia Civil Nova, where burnt books hang on a livid horizon teeming with poles / crosses , at the bottom of which, however, flashes of light stand out.