contessanally: Venice - Palazzo Ducale - Sala dello Scrutinio - Anselm Kiefer

Installation view - copyright - Anselm Kiefer - photo Andrea Avezzu - Courtesy - Gagosian

Courtesy - Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia

Palazzo Ducale - Sala dello Scrutinio

Anselm Kiefer

Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce

Andrea Emo

Anselm Kiefer was invited by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia to present a site-specific installation of paintings that responds to one of the most important spaces in the Palazzo Ducale - the monumental - Sala dello Scrutinio - and to the history of Venice. The exhibition, to coincide with the 59th Venice Biennale is entitled - These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light - Andrea Emo - until October 29 - is curated by Gabriella Belli and Janne Siren.

https://palazzoducale.visitmuve.it/

“It sometimes happens that there is a convergence between past and present moments, and as they come together one experiences something of that stillness in the hollow of a wave about to break. Originating in the past but pertaining at bottom to something more than the past, such moments belong as much to the present as to the past, and what they generate is of the utmost importance.”

Anselm Kiefer

Manuela Luca-Dazio and Anselm Kiefer

"Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce"

Andrea Emo

Philosophical and literary references have always been central to an understanding of Anselm Kiefer’s work. The exhibition takes its title - Anselm Kiefer - Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce - loosely translated as - these writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light - from the writings of the Venetian philosopher Andrea Emo - 1901-1983. Kiefer first encountered Emo’s work six years ago and his artistic method has striking parallels with Emo’s philosophical thought.

Fondazione Musei Civici Venezia

Anselm Kiefer’s monumental body of work represents a microcosm of collective memory, visually encapsulating a broad range of cultural, literary, and philosophical allusions—from the Old and New Testaments, Kabbalah mysticism, Norse mythology and Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Born during the closing months of World War II, Kiefer reflects upon Germany’s post-war identity and history, grappling with the national mythology of the Third Reich. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos. His boundless repertoire of imagery is paralleled only by the breadth of media palpable in his work.

Anselm Kiefer

Sala dello Scrutinio

Anselm Kiefer - These writings when burned, will finally cast a little light

Exhibition

The Palazzo Ducale has served as a backdrop to generations of artists including Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto and many others. The monumental space of the Sala dello Scrutinio was the venue for the elections of the Doge and its walls are richly decorated with paintings celebrating the power of the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia.

"As concerns the pictures, I toy with history. With Andrea Emo I have found confirmation that history is a chain of illogical, ahistorical actions, incidents that have nothing to do with cause and effect. Each event is a step forward against the law of necessity. However, I toy with both historical time and geological time. There’s the painting with the continents: that’s geological time; see Alfred Wegener’s Continental Drift Theory. Then there’s the painting with the uniforms: historical time, the power of the Serenissima on the terra firma..."

Anselm Kiefer

letter to Gabriella Belli

In the installation in Palazzo Ducale Anselm Kiefer also reflects upon Venice’s unique position between north and south and the interplay of the Orient with the Occident. He sees equally meaningful connections between all these different cultures and the history of Venice, where the words of Goethe’s tragic play, Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy - 1832 - still resonate.

co-curator - Janne Siren - director Albright-Knox Gallery

“The mission of this great project is to understand the need for public spaces to bear witness to our time, to construct an epiphany of our contemporary era, and to put on stage the present and its universal values."

Gabriella Belli

Co-curator - Gabriella Belli - Director - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

Mariacristina Gribaudi - President - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

"The painting with the coffin containing the body of Saint Mark refers to human time. Inside the coffin is a small sack with the relics. Even more important relics come to mind, for example, the nails from the cross that Jesus Christ was nailed to. Andrea Emo is certain that Christ really did die on the cross. He sees the resurrection in the cross itself and not afterwards. For God exists in his self- destruction. He “de-activates” himself."

Anselm Kiefer

letter to Gabriella Belli

"You’ll see: the new space I’ve created is an overlapping of all possible ideas, philosophies from the North, from the South, from the Orient as well as from the Occident. But there are also direct, childishly ironic interjections, for instance, the image with the shopping carts, each of which assigned to a Doge

with a zinc name tag."

Anselm Kiefer

letter to Gabriella Belli