The State Hermitage Museum is staging Anselm Kiefer’s first solo exhibition in Russia as part of its commemoration of the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
Anselm Kiefer, for Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations, which opens on 30 May (until 3 September), is co-organised with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, one of the galleries that represents the German artist. With around 30 new works inspired by Kiefer’s visit to St Petersburg last year, the show is dedicated to the Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov.
Kiefer conceived the works especially for the vast Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace, says Dimitri Ozerkov, the head of the Hermitage’s contemporary art department and a co-curator of the show. Ozerkov calls it “the main event for the [Revolution] centenary at the State Hermitage”.
“Not everyone will like this exhibition,” says the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, in the exhibition catalogue. “It is rigorous and demands reflection”, pitting the “white expanse” of the hall against Kiefer’s “dank” landscapes, Piotrovsky writes. The show “speaks of complex things: the German spirit, mysticism, the Kabbalah, the Holocaust”.
Kiefer was inspired by Khlebnikov’s numerological theory of history, which drew on the great battles of the past to foretell future cataclysms. The poet was hailed as the King of Time, predicting in a 1912 pamphlet that a state would fall in 1917. He was “a poet of the revolution, and a revolutionary of the poetic idiom”, according to Piotrovsky.
The exhibition also includes pictures of smoking towers that “inevitably take the viewer back to September 11”, Piotrovsky writes, uncovering another connection between the artist and the poet. His essay quotes Khlebnikov’s 1919 poem Ladomir (lightland) as a prophecy of the disaster:
And the castles of world trade
Where the chains of poverty shine
With a face of malevolence and rapture,
One day you will turn to ash.
