CHRIS FREMANTLE

Installation of Anselm Kiefer’s group of works dedicated to women variously excluded or written out for their knowledge of plants, medicine, transmutation and life.

On the one hand it is very much Kiefer, on the other, where in the past you could hear the tracked vehicles in the winter landscapes. These on the other hand might still be landscape but this is different. Some are fields of gold, whilst others might be polluted. I’m not sure there isn’t a question about whether alchemy doesn’t have an inherent complexity. Turning lead into gold probably isn’t a clean process.

The room these works are installed in was bombed by the Allies in WWII and has been restored though the caryatids have been left. The ceiling is painted rather than plaster. The floor is patched terrazzo.

The mirrors installed around the room add to the complexity. You can see why Kiefer liked this space.

And it is worth thinking about these as paintings. You can’t quite see the back of the canvas in the photo.

But Kiefer has a fabulous graphic ability

And this face could be from a graphic novel

We might have stereotyped these women as ugly, old, fat, hairy but Kiefer convinces us of their power

The catalogue provides fuller biographies to the extent we know them