Anselm Kiefer had familiarized visitors well with his penchant for monumentality, as evidenced by the enormous “Seven Heavenly Palaces” on permanent display in the Pirelli HangarBicocca. This time too, he didn’t let himself be outdone in the inner courtyard of the Palazzo Strozzi: his “Angel’s Fall” is a seven-meter-high mammoth painting that tells our entire story on a gold leaf background. too human humanity (to put it like Nietzsche).
The work depicts the rebellious angels expelled from paradise by the archangel Michael, who points his sword into the heaven of the divine will and reveals his name written in Hebrew at the top right. The “Angel’s Fall” manifests the eternal struggle between good and evil, metaphysical and material, divine and human, and acts as an excerpt from the luminous dialogue between ancient and modern that will take place in the halls of the castle.
“Fallen Angels”, curated by Arturo Galansino, is a testament to the mastery of the German artist who, with the bold help of different and unusual techniques and materials (plaster, seeds, plants, metals, gold), creates an extraordinary potpourri that is reminiscent of painting Philosophy ranges from classical to modern literature: “I work on many projects at the same time.
A garden in which many plants grow together
The result resembles a garden in which many plants grow together.” With a wink to the classical dead languages and constant references to Greek myths, the exhibition begins with “Lucifer,” in which an airplane wing emerges from the painting, while Lucifer – a new Icarus – crashes due to excess Breasts, the Greek arrogance. The contrast between angel wings and air wings ranges from an image of freedom to a symbol of death for daring to ignore danger and one’s limitations. In works such as “Sol Invictus” he renews his eternal connection with nature: the reference to sun cults that celebrate light over darkness can be seen in the golden backgrounds and the giant sunflowers that embody the cyclical idea of time and life. The sunflower – often attributed to Van Gogh – is associated with the thought of Robert Fludd, an English alchemist who associated each plant with a star, a link between the earthly and the heavenly. Noteworthy is the room dedicated to the great figures of ancient philosophers, with the three works “Of Socrates”, which narrates a pseudo-family tree of the pre-Socratics (including Archimedes and Parmenides), “Ave Maria” with the heads of both pre-Socratics and post-Socratic thinkers (Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes), while “The School of Athens” traces its roots back to Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican. Thanks to the materiality of the elements used, the heads of the great men of the past seem to protrude from the canvases.
The exhibition ends with Kiefer’s debut in 1969, in which he, still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, had himself photographed in his father’s officer’s uniform, imitating the Nazi salute in order to normalize its horror. Kiefer’s intention was to challenge the twilight culture of the time: the verses of “Ed è Subito sera” by Salvatore Quasimodo were present in the room, symbolizing a struggle for the transience of life and submission to death. And so the tragedies of history are inextricably linked to the existentialism of people who are still fragile fallen angels.
