Expanded field: Anselm Kiefer,
Under the Lime Tree – On the Heather, 2019
Solo Show
Over the Summer Break, I visited Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard, which explored memory, decay, regeneration, and transcendence through the use of impasto, ash, straw, gold leaf, clay, and poetic inscriptions within sunflower and wheat field paintings, positioning the landscape as a site of existential, historical, and metaphysical inquiry (White Cube, 2025).
I was particularly drawn to Under the Lime Tree – On the Heather (2019), where Kiefer merges emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw, clay, and charcoal into dense gestural passages that incorporate three-dimensionality. The painting’s textured, material-heavy surface extends beyond the flatness of canvas, dissolving the boundary between two-and three-dimensionality.
For me, this work reads as a painting expanded into sculpture, a surface where the human body is not directly depicted but alluded to through traces of matter and process. The charred straw, for instance, carries human history; tied to agricultural labour, domestic life, and survival, it becomes a residue of human activity, a ghost of the body embedded in material memory.
Similarly, in my own practice, I extend printmaking into the sculptural realm. I think of the print as something tactile, spatial, and bodily, with embossments acting as tattoo-like marks that inscribe reflections of my home into the skin. I use surface and relief as bodily metaphors, engaging with touch, depth, and presence to reframe printmaking as an imprint of physical being. These material transformations result in low-relief sculptural forms, that hold a tension between emergence and disappearance. Ultimately, I conceive paper as skin imprinted with fragmented reflections of the surrounding landscape of my remembered home.
Anselm Kiefer, Under the Lime Tree – On the Heather, 2019. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw, clay, and charcoal on canvas. 280 x 760 cm. Installation view at White Cube London.
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