Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. His works incorporate straws, ashes, clays, leads, shellacs. His works are characterised by a dull/musty, nearly depressive, destructive style and are often done in large scale formats. In most of his works, the use of photography as an output surface is common and earth and other raw materials of nature are often incorporated. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures or names of humans, legendary figures or places particularly loaded with history in nearly all of his paintings. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this often gets him linked with a style called "New Symbolism." When I first stepped in the room of the installation, I saw a giant murky grey rectangle hanging on the wall. But as I stepped further back from the painting, I saw a helicopter view of a city with skyscrapers hidden in clouds. The materials and layered paints make the painting look 3D, with the skyscrapers literally etched into paint more than an inch thick, and copper wires winding through the streets. Just by looking at it, you will feel the dirt, the grime. The painting’s materials speak for themselves. Oil, ash and copper. Kiefer has simply transferred the building blocks of our cities to canvas.
Humanity Asleep by Julian Schnabel (1983)
Julian Schnabel, probably the most exhibited, financially successful and aggressively self-promoting American artist of his generation, was born in 1951 and studied at the University of Houston from 1969 to 1973 before participating in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme in 1973–4.
Humanity Asleep, when you see it in a distance I thought it just a ordinary painting. But as you look closer its actually painted over a surface of broken crockery like vases, bowls, plates…. This creates a very 3 dimensional painting. It is a typical example of what some critics regard as his attention-seeking devices. Alternatively it can be seen as the product of a preference for collaged and textured surfaces of unusual materials, such as velvet and animal hides, as well as the use of canvas instead of pre-sized canvases.
The image of the raft comes from a photograph of soldiers clinging to driftwood taken during the Second World War and was also used in a larger painting entitled ‘The Raft’ (1982). The angel with a sword and wings was painted from life from a Puerto Rican Santos figure that the artist had purchased from an antique dealer.
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