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Exposição de pintura . António Pessoa
Primavera e Verão

Parece que afinal de contas o artista consegue fazer prevalecer a sua vontade,dando-se a conhecer um pouco mais no seu próprio país.
Pois,vejamos se para a pintura tem demonstrado ter engenho e arte para dar e vender,faltava tirar a prova dos nove,se ainda assim António Pessoa conseguia convencer Vicente Fernández Lago,a decidir-se finalmente a divulgar de uma forma mais adequada,a sua obra em terras lusas.
O Sr.Fernández Lago,apesar da fama que tem de ser um homem teimoso e muito fiel aos seus caprichos,no que se refere a António Pessoa felizmente sempre parece fazer uma pausa na sua obstinada natureza,concedendo ao artista,por respeito,por hábito e também às vezes até por distração,essa cedência por influência de uma simpatia moral e vamos lá vêr,até mesmo pragmática.
E o resultado começa a estar à vista com três "long play"exposições simultâneas e outras que tantas já programadas para esta temporada
de Primavera-Verão na bela Galiza.
António Pessoa precocemente reformado,que é como quem diz,como se sabe,porém pelo menos na sua atitude e modelo de vida dá visiveis sinais de estar bem onde está, restringindo o seu circulo de amigos intimos ao minimo imprescindivel e desta forma preservando uma certa qualidade social,que não só o inspira e o enriquece espiritualmente,como o vai por assim dizer protegendo de más influências e de interferências
negativas.
Intrinsecamente desinteressado por questões mundanas como fama,dinheiro,compromissos sociais cerimoniosos e acima de tudo cada vez
mais insensível ao ritmo estupefaciente das grandes urbes,Home Studio-Antonio Pessoa reveste-se cada vez mais de uma atmosfera de trabalho plástico,silêncio e pensamento,estudo,análise politica e social,invenção,lazer e contemplação.

Esta exposição patente ao público todos os meses de Primavera e Verão adapata-se bastante ao critério estético e até climático de António
Pessoa,artista bastante habituado à atmosfera da Dolce Vita do sul da Peninsula desde a sua adolescência,apesar de ter vivido seis anos entre Londres e Amsterdam.
Ainda que Worlwide seja um projecto que lhe vai exigir ceder e abdicar do conforto semi-tropical no qual se encontra como um peixe dentro de água,para enfrentar-se à turbulência de cidades como Nova Iorque,Chicago,Los Angeles,Dallas e até mesmo em sua casa,Barcelona,facto que verdade seja dita para o artista consiste muito mais em sofrimento do que em prazer,António Pessoa faz o sacrificio e toma inteiramente a responsabilidade perante si mesmo e naturalmente perante os muitos colaboradores que dependem e vivem exclusivamente do e para o projecto.
Obviamente ainda sem certezas concretas é contudo muito possivel que o pintor português venha durante estes meses de Primavera e Verão
a marcar algumas vezes presença neste paraiso algarvio,obviamente dependendo também da sua voluminosa agenda.
Tendo sido sempre a sua região favorita em Portugal,onde o artista já viveu e passou longas temporadas desde a sua adolescência,o Algarve
continua a provocar-lhe essa sensação de bem-estar e êxtase o que muito provavelmente pode significar que de facto apareça por aí,quanto mais não seja para dar um ar da sua graça.
Sém dúvida que vale a pena se a alma não é pequena,pegar na familia,meter-se no Popó e vir até cá aos belos Algarves,claro está no Carvoeiro,
Suites Alba Resort & Spa,em jeito de férias e naturalmente com os sentidos apurados para visualizar uma das colecções hoje em dia,mais representativas das artes plásticas portuguesas.



Veronica Amaral

Anselm Kiefer

“I’m interested in reconstructing symbols. It’s about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.” Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth
June 21–September 9, 2006
For more than thirty-five years, Anselm Kiefer has considered fundamental questions about humanity’s place in the cosmos, undertaking a visual exploration of the concept of spirituality and the relationship between heaven and earth. The son of an art educator, Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany, in 1945, during the final months of World War II. In 1965, Kiefer began to study law, not because he felt a great desire to become a lawyer, but because he was fascinated by the more philosophical and spiritual aspects of law. As part of his quest to “think quietly about the larger questions,” he spent three weeks at the Dominican monastery of La Tourette, in France. This visit was a turning point for Kiefer, who decided to abandon his law studies and pursue his interest in art. He enrolled at the university at Freiburg and later studied informally in Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), whose use of unusual materials, allusions to history, mythology, religion, and art, and direct response in his imagery to the Holocaust would become important facets of the younger artist’s work.
Kiefer’s art can be called labyrinthine or maze-like due to the complexity and layering of his references, symbols, and images, which intertwine such diverse sources as treatises on alchemy; Nordic, Greek, Egyptian, and early Christian mythology; and mystical Jewish texts. The artist often creates apocalyptic visions, as in the ominous Jerusalem, 1985 (at left), and the euphoric Isaac, 2005. Heaven and earth. Hope and skepticism. Creation and destruction. These apparent opposites lie at the core of Kiefer’s work, which consistently delves into these dualities and suggests the ways in which they overlap and merge with one another.
This sense of layering is essential to an understanding of Kiefer’s art as a whole. While individual pieces are powerful in themselves, viewing an array of works conveys the depth and complexity of their interrelationships, as well as the extent of the artist’s innovation. Kiefer has never limited himself to one medium, and his groundbreaking approaches to painting and sculpture are equaled by his assertion of the book as a visual art form. His materials, a blend of traditional media and natural elements including clay, earth, ash, and dried plants, as well as his signature lead, not only evoke the potential and limitations of transformation, but are often as symbolically charged as his imagery.
The land itself, whether barren or wooded, has played a central role in Kiefer’s work. Landscapes, including Winter Landscape, 1970 (at left), The Book, 1979–85, and The Hierarchy of Angels, 1985–87, offer explorations of the connections between the seemingly desolate earth battered by human history and the heavenly realm. Wooded scenes, which in paintings like Man in the Forest, 1971, appear set within a forest primeval, suggest ancient narratives like the Norse legend of the Yggdrasil, in which the universe is envisioned as a sprawling evergreen. Equally, Kiefer’s trees allude to the Judeo-Christian Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the biblical Garden of Eden and the Jewish Tree of Life, as well as pre-Christian traditions of nature-based medicinal magic. The artist represents himself in many of these paintings, either as the sole figure in a landscape or symbolically as a palette linking the earth and sky. In the case of Resurrexit, 1973, his presence is implied by the stairs at the top of the image that lead to an unseen realm, perhaps heaven or merely the attic room in the Oden Forest that Kiefer used as his studio in the 1970s.
Symbolically complex works like Quaternity, 1973 (at left), present even more challenging metaphors of spirituality. Set in the wooden interior of Kiefer’s studio, three fires are labeled as Vater (Father), Sohn (Son), and hl. Geist (Holy Ghost): the Christian Trinity. Yet here there are four earthbound elements (the title of the work derives from the Latin root word for four) that comprise this heavenly order. The interpretation is further complicated by the fact that the fourth element is a serpent, clearly labeled Satan, that emerges from the shadows and is connected to the flames by visible lines. The artist repeatedly uses fire as a potent symbol of the link between heaven and earth—fire exists in the sky (in the form of lightening and stars) and on land, made by humans. It is a double-edged presence that is a source of light (knowledge) but also a potential destructive force.
The stars themselves are an important symbol in paintings such as Star Fall, 2004, Voyage to the End of Night, 2004, and the enormous book The Secret Life of Plants, 2001 (at left). Many of these works, with their named stars or patterns recalling the outlines of constellations, resemble the astronomical charts that have recently become of interest to the artist. Although it may seem ironic that a monumental book titled The Secret Life of Plants would contain fields of stars instead of botanical studies, for Kiefer both the heavens and plants represent earth’s beginnings and the eternal process of transformation—from creation to destruction to regeneration—that is crucial to all of his work. This play of word and image occurs repeatedly; thus The Milky Way, 1985–87, rather than offering an expansive view of the galaxy is dominated by a vast, charred landscape with a gash at its center labeled die Milchstrasse (the Milky Way) and a funnel with tendrils that connect it to the sky.
Kiefer’s focus on star charts is also a means of looking back to a time when the night sky evoked the possibility of a mysterious heavenly realm and planets were strange messengers that suggested our beginnings. His representations of the seven heavenly palaces and the merkaba (or merkawa)—both from the ancient Hebrew book the Sefer Hechaloth, which describes the journey from earth in a chariot (merkaba or merkawa) through seven heavenly palaces to the final palace revealing God—are equally a part of the artist’s continued exploration and relation of ancient to modern. As he has said, the “palaces of heaven are still a mystery. . . I am making my own investigation.”
Deborah Horowitz, based on texts by Michael Auping from the exhibition catalogue
The exhibition is organized by Michael Auping, chief curator of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, whose association with Kiefer dates back almost two decades. The presentation at the Hirshhorn is coordinated by curator Valerie Fletcher.


Anselm Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. After taking courses in law at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg from 1965 to 1966, he studied art there under Peter Dreher in 1966. He continued his studies with Horst Antes at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 1969 before transferring the following year to the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. Beuys's interest in deploying an array of cultural myths, metaphors, and symbols as a means by which to engage and understand history inspired Kiefer. He first addressed the problem of history, particularly Germany's contentious history, in 1969 in a series dubbed Occupations, a collection of photographic self-portraits taken in France, Switzerland, and Italy, which show him in military garb with his arm raised in a Hitlerian salute. In this same year, Kiefer had his first solo exhibition, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe.
Occupations signaled the future direction of Kiefer's work. In his endeavor to explore his identity and heritage through art making, he boldly confronted Theodor Adorno's declaration: �"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Early works, like Winter Landscape (1970) and Man in the Forest (1973), highlight human suffering and loneliness. In 1973, Kiefer turned his attention to architecture, painting a series of large-scale canvases set in the wood-grained attic of his home. With highly symbolic titles, including Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1973) and Germany's Spiritual Heroes (1973), these interiors possess a distinct psychological charge, much like van Gogh's representations of his own bedroom. The cavernous attic is a metaphor for the artist's mind, a universe in which conflict and contradiction are resolved through creation.
The profane realities of history overtook myth in Kiefer's work as of 1974. His canvases, with backdrops of charred and smoldering ploughed earth, became increasingly hermetic in their iconography, decipherable only with the help of the words and phrases he inscribed on them. Cockchafer Fly (1974) includes text from a German nursery rhyme, revealing the subject to be Pomerania, a German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Others, like Operation Winter Storm (1975) and Operation Sea Lion I (1975), reveal the artist's continued preoccupation with his homeland�s Nazi past. During this same period, Kiefer commenced a series of paintings examining art's redemptive role in history. Nero Paints (1974) and To Paint (1974) consist of landscapes overlaid with a huge palette.
In the early 1980s, Kiefer's interest in content was accompanied by an equal focus on both the materiality of the canvas and the visual complexity of its surface, a concept he first began to explore in his book designs, the earliest of which dates to 1969. Kiefer introduced a host of new materials to his aesthetic vocabulary, including wood, sand, lead, and straw. These natural elements lend his work a marked fragility, often in contradiction to their stark subject matter. Margarete (1981) and Nuremberg (1982), for instance, invoke Nazi atrocities against Jews, but the shimmering presence of straw across their surfaces imbues them with a tactility of unsettling delicacy and beauty. Kiefer's preoccupation with Nazi rule precipitated another series of paintings during this period, which take the architecture of Albert Speer, the Führer's official builder, as their point of departure. Interior (1981), for example, shows the Mosaic Room in Hitler's Chancellery.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, mystical and mythological themes continued to proliferate in Kiefer's ongoing dialogue with the past. With the approach of the new millennium, he looked beyond Germany for subject matter. Between 1995 and 2001, he undertook a cycle of monumental paintings of the cosmos. Light Compulsion (1999), the largest to date, shows the Milky Way, its depth and composition echoing that of Pollock's drip paintings. Architecture returned to the fore in 1997 with a series of archaic desert clay structures. In Your Age and My Age and the Age of the World (1997), an Egyptian pyramid rises from the barren earth. Since the late 1990s, Kiefer has devoted his energy increasingly to sculpture in mixed media; lead, however, remains a preferred material. Plants, too, are prominent in Kiefer�s recent work. The pages of his artist�s book The Secret Life of Plants (1997) as well as the surfaces of two paintings of the same title (1998 and 2001) contain images of sunflowers made using seeds from that blossom. Every Plant Has Its Related Star in the Sky (2001) ruminates on the related mysteries of the plant and celestial worlds.
The Japan Art Association presented Kiefer with the Praemium Imperiale Award in 1999. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984), Art Institute of Chicago (1987), Sewon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), and Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001). He lives and works in Barjac, France.