The Brooklyn Rail

Elusive and allusive, Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) requires us to learn a new pictorial language with each new show. Especially here, where his point of departure is a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke (b. 1875; d. 1926): “Put Out My Eyes” from his 1905 The Book of Hours. Rilke embodies the fin-de-siècle’s aestheticism, which conceived art as a religion. His poem is a nine-verse rhymed structure, an apostrophe or plea to God or a God: “Put out my eyes: and I shall see you, too,/seal up my ears: and I shall hear you still.” Seeing without eyes, hearing without ears—this is the paradoxical language of mystics who fuse with the godhead and then try to express what they experienced.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James reduced the modus operandi of such visionaries to four ideas: the ineffable (experience that defies translation into language), insight (revelation of divinity’s nature), brevity (the experience doesn’t last), and possession (being under the control of a higher power). Kiefer transforms Rilke’s mystical experience or its artistic equivalent into paint, showing that while art production is a solitary act, the artist is nevertheless accompanied by invisible powers. The collage For R.M.R. (2023–25) highlights Kiefer’s debt to Rilke by including a verse of his poem and a shadowy human figure who might be either Rilke or Rilke’s muse, the femme fatale Lou Andreas-Salomé, to whom he dedicated The Book of Hours.

Kiefer relates his paintings to a longer tradition by naming several other figures from ancient myths that involve fate or the interaction of gods and mortals. He refers to seven female figures from mythology: Neæra, a nymph connected with Helios and the dawn; Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon who avenges her father’s murder; Clæa, a nymph linked to a cave; Dryope, a forest nymph; Clytie and Leucothoe, transformed into flowers by Helios; and Tyche, the goddess of chance. This seemingly haphazard list of divinities reminds us that when gods interact (usually sexually) with lesser beings, it is typically fatal for mortals. But ultimately it is the goddess Tyche, as Kiefer views her, that demands our attention.

Kiefer’s painting of Tyche (2024) hangs alone on the gallery’s northern wall. Facing away from us, the goddess stands in a (vaguely) circular or elliptical space looking toward the sunrise. Luck can be good or bad, and the goddess is capricious. Here, Kiefer enacts what every artist feels standing opposite a blank canvas: it’s a toss of the dice. What will the results mean for the artist or the unknowable viewer? To make art is to make a bet, to hope that inspiration (the muse, the nymphs) will lend assistance and that someone out there will understand what is at stake. Kiefer’s huge (110 by 149-inch) collage is simultaneously a landscape and a complex icon, a self-portrait not of the artist but of the fate of the artist. Tyche never shows us her true face and acts unpredictably. As such, Kiefer’s depiction of her is simultaneously menacing and poignant.

That this show is art about art is confirmed in the monumental (110 by 185-inch) painting that greets the visitor entering the gallery. Naturwirklichkeit und Kunstwahrheit (Natural Reality and Artistic Truth) (2005–25) enacts the moment of translation when the artist departs from nature to create his own nature. The canvas, like Tyche, is dominated by an ovoid shape that reappears in all the works here: a vortex that will either engulf the artist or the viewer. This is the void into which Kiefer must plunge, trusting to greater powers and his own instincts, to produce his work. As in the other works here, Kiefer uses vast quantities of paint, deploying uncharacteristically bright flashes of color to show that not everything is darkness.

In Gagosian’s north-south viewing room, we experience the sublime nature of Kiefer’s work most palpably. Facing each other are two paintings, Elektra (Electra) (2025), on the north wall, and Klytia und Leukothoe (Clytie and Leucothoe) (2025), on the south wall. In both of these works, pure abstraction and expressionistic figuration play a role, as if Kiefer was fully aware that he could easily leave reality behind and slip into an exultation of paint as paint. It is that tension which brings us back to Rilke’s poem: once you have had the experience of fusion with the greater power—call it what you will—you can neither forget it nor express it in ordinary language.