This artist is firmly associated with the weightiest of materials and themes—his monumental paintings and sculptures have incorporated lead, clay and wood and have dwelt on the darkest passages of German history via exalted literary reference—so this exhibition may surprise some in its partial focus on that gentlest of formats: watercolor. But Kiefer being Kiefer, even this hobbyist’s favorite is invested with a certain gravitas. Shown alongside dozens of his handmade books enclosed in vitrines, and accompanied by several characteristically massive, encrusted landscape canvases, the works on paper see him riff on a body of work produced in the mid-1970s.
While the landscapes are romantic in the broadest sense, the watercolors and books have an explicitly human, sensual cast. Juxtaposing ecstatic female nudes with sunsets, fields and flowers—and inscribing them with the names of female saints and mystics—Kiefer presents a meditation on nature that oscillates, like so much of his oeuvre, between genuine timelessness and tone-deaf pretension. For those prepared to indulge the artist’s grand spiritual (and erotic) ambitions and to overlook his corresponding disavowal of “contemporary” self-awareness, this exhibit offers fertile ground indeed. Others, however, may continue to find his project less seductive.