On Wednesday, November 23, we walked to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, not realizing that the current show included a show of recent work by German born artist Anselm Kiefer, one of our favorite artists. The Cleveland Museum of Art owns his massive work entitled "Lot's Wife", and we visit this canvass whenever we are in the museum.
When you stand in front of a Kiefer painting, you feel as if you have just stepped into a post-apocalyptic world where little is left but shards of objects left abandoned in pools of drying, cracking paint.There is something about nothingness that connects with the empty spaces inside one's spirit-- and for me, no artist makes that connection better than Kiefer.
His show, entitled "Breaking of the Vessels", was inspired from, among other things, the Jewish mystical book "The Kabbalah." A Kabbalistic creation story says that God compressed Godself to create the world, but the vessels could not contain the light of God and shattered. The namesake work in this show was created by Kiefer in a room built especially for this show, and features his familiar lead books surrounded by and interpenetrated by broken shards of glass. Are the vessels the books of scripture? Are they the ideas, beliefs, and stories they contain? How are they broken? is God still there in the shattered remnants?
The themes of the other works in the show are often Biblical; such as the companion paintings "Noah" and "Ararat"; "Cain and Abel", and "The Salt of the Earth." We were astonished at our good luck at finding once again on our sabbatical path an exceptional temporary show from an artist we love.
Location:Tel Aviv
No comments:
Post a Comment