Anselm Kiefer: Artworks as Reconciliation for Isreal & Germany

THE INDEPENDENT
By Michael Glover

"Samson" (2011) by Anselm Kiefer

ISRAEL -- A major exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Anselm Kiefer, a man born a Catholic in a small village in the Black Forest during the last year of the Second World War, opens today in the new wing of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the very building in which Ben Gurion declared the independence of Israel in 1948. "It is an act of reconciliation," he explains. "I am striving for a kind of reunification." It is also a ghostly reminder of all that has been lost: during the 1920s there was a profound collaboration between Jewish and German culture. As an artist, Kiefer has been engaged with Jewish mysticism, the Bible and the idea of the nationhood of Israel for more than a quarter of a century. Samson (see above)  includes both an allusion to the biblical Samson – a representation of the gates of Gaza – and a rusting machine gun (with Samson's name painted on it) whose presence here reminds us of Israel's war of independence. [link]