Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy

Today´s the last day to see Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy 
Royal Academy, London

Anselm Kiefer’s monumental work in ash, straw, diamonds and sunflowers dazzles in a superb retrospective.

Here I quote from Rachel Cooke-

• ......he works on a grand scale in lead, sand, gold leaf, copper wire, broken ceramics, straw, wood and even diamonds, his ideas informed by, among many other subjects, the Holocaust, Egyptian mythology, the architecture of Albert Speer, German Romanticism and the poems of Paul Celan. He is the kind of artist whose physical presence – in his black T-shirts and rimless spectacles, he puts one in mind just lately of an executive from Apple – always comes as a surprise. How, you wonder, can a man who deals with so much weighty stuff have such regular-looking shoulders, such ordinary biceps? And why is he smiling? Doesn’t the darkness ever threaten to engulf him? Doesn’t his project – now more than 40 years old – sometimes pinch at his sanity?

A poem by Paul Celan, To Stand in The Shadow

To stand in the Shadow
of the Wound’s-Mark in the Air.

For no-one and nothing to Stand.
Unknown,
for you
alone.

With all, that within finds Room,
even without
Speech.