Viewing history not as a straight and completed line, but as a vast pile where myths, disasters, collective memory, and losses interweave, Anselm Kiefer continues to build contemporary art’s most solemn monuments. In his artistic journey, which began by confronting the political and moral legacy of post-World War II Germany, the master artist—who constantly transforms the past within the present using lead, straw, ash, and layered paint textures—prepares to return to London late this autumn with his recently produced canvases.
White Cube Bermondsey will bring together a brand-new selection of paintings emerging from Kiefer’s studio with a solo exhibition running between November 25, 2026, and January 24, 2027. In the artist’s colossal pictorial universe, time, rather than following a one-way flow, piles up in layers onto the canvas surface. Placing nature’s destructive and healing powers, alchemy, and ancient mythologies at the core of his practice, Kiefer stands once again in these new canvases at that eerie yet equally hopeful threshold between the elusive nature of meaning and humanity’s collective memory.
When Bermondsey’s industrial-scale gallery volume combines with that dense and stirring mass created by Kiefer’s monumental canvases, a deep space of contemplation imparting the weight of time and memory will open in London in the final months of the year. Re-working the husks of the past with today’s materials, these paintings offer a remarkably powerful refuge for those wishing to stand on the brink of winter and gaze upon the noise of history through the possibilities of painting.
