Margarethe 1981

Anselm Kiefer made Margarethe with oil, straw and charcoal, probably after 1981. Just imagine him layering these materials onto the canvas, smearing and building up texture, almost like sculpting with paint. I think it would have been a pretty physical process. The straw feels brittle yet determined, like Kiefer was trying to grasp something just beyond reach. There's this tension in the materials, the delicacy of the straw against the roughness of the charcoal. It’s like he's not just painting a picture, he's building a world. That name, “Margarethe”, hovers in the middle ground, scrawled almost as an afterthought. Kiefer always struck me as a history painter, but with a twist. He embraces the weight of the past but refuses to be crushed by it. It makes me think of other artists, like Antoni Tàpies, who are similarly playing with texture and material to evoke a sense of history and memory. Artists are always in conversation with each other, across time. It is all one big, messy, beautiful, ongoing conversation.