Alkahest 2009

This is Anselm Kiefer’s *Alkahest*, and it feels like he made it with ideas and materials that are so raw, they still have a kind of electricity to them. The color palette is almost entirely grey, stone-like and elemental. The eye is drawn to that ribbon snaking across the floor, from the brimming pail precariously perched on a chair, all the way across the gallery to where it has gathered itself in a kind of coil. It's a monochrome river. I think about the way Kiefer uses material to convey weight, history, memory, even trauma. The title refers to a universal solvent, and in a way, that's what art making feels like. It dissolves fixed ideas. Art doesn't give you answers, it opens up a space. I’m reminded of the arte povera movement, with artists like Mario Merz, who used simple, everyday materials. Kiefer feels like their dark cousin, wrestling with equally fundamental but more complicated stuff.