‘Finnegan’s Wake’ by Anselm Kiefer at the White Cube Gallery, Bermondsey

There was a pleasant buzz about Bermondsey dotted with indy delis and coffee shops. 

The White Cube gallery is a minimalist industrial-style building fenced and with its own frontage. I liked it as it stood with warehouses and council estate blocks as its backdrop complimenting its manufacturing factory design.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Anselm Kiefer’s exhibit was in the same vein. ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ was a highly impressive range of immersive installations, one of three.

Ruined, industrial, derelict. The main hall was filled with exposed bricks, concrete rubble chunks, dead flowers, bones, industrial clothing, metal double helixes. Well you start to get the point. Like a well thought-out scrap yard organised messily onto shelves stacked high, quotes from the witty book scrawled in cursive randomly.

There were other rooms to the sides with their own installations, very much sticking to the main hall’s theme. A massive room houses a pile of sand amongst massive concrete slabs and barbed wire. Its size was necessary and effective in drawing attention and thought. It segregates itself from the works in the hall by its sheer volume and scale.

The paintings hung on the gallery walls were also eye catching and appropriate back drops for the 3D pieces. I really liked the sinister feel one of them had with spikey triangles protruding from it.

Kiefer’s bold message about the atrocities of war was certainly well represented. The exhibit can be seen as one giant organism that relay depression and negativity to one’s senses. But the coolest thing is one can also zoom in to specific items and see the sheer detail that Kiefer had carefully thought-out. This was more than a war-torn Ikea. It was very contradictory to a junkyard themed piece of work.