Anselm Kiefer, White Cube Bermondsey

White Cube Bermondsey is probably one of the best gallery’s to house Anselm Kiefer’s new works. They are characteristically massive and overwhelming and the large open rooms with high ceilings and lots of space to stand back and view them works endlessly in their favour. All but one of the pieces are in landscape format and the one that is in portrait is housed in the tower-like room of the White Cube, giving the painting the height it needs to tower over us, the miniature audience.

The paintings follow on from Kiefer’s previous works, using similar language of highly textured, layered up depictions of fields and buildings, with life-size objects inserted into the surface. Sticks and branches are pushed into the soft ground of paint and plaster to make up forests and plant stems. The same branches are twisted and painted to create runes, ancient symbols that made up the early Germanic language of the Nordic people before Latin swept Europe. Amongst the dried plant matter are rusted axes enmeshed in the undergrowth, with the handle growing branches of its own, the axe representing the solution Alexander the Great applied to the impossibly tangled Gordian Knot.

Kiefer ties Norse mythology, the legend of Phrygian Gordium and the modern-day physics of String Theory together to unite ways in which mankind has tried to understand the universe throughout history. The sublime is also encountered as one stands before these heavy-laden paintings that fill your entire field of vision. The bleak scenes depict scorched and snow covered landscapes with a perspective that allows us to see the intricate and detailed elements up close, but also to see how they stretch off into the distance among thousands of others, simultaneously showing us the uniqueness of individual objects but also how insignificant they are in the enormous mass of objects that makes up the world.

A highlight for me was the depictions of an amphitheatre or parliament placed at the top of landscapes, the symmetries and rigid structure of pattern imposed on the chaos of nature. The dark shades make it feel as if this symbol of power and hierarchy burns the landscape its in, reminding us of the atrocities enacted by regimes of the 20th Century.