Poetry is the only possible reality. Everything else is an illusion.
— Anselm Kiefer

Hommage à un poète (Homage to a poet) is an exhibition of new works by the German artist Anselm Kiefer, taking place at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin. On view will be eighteen large-scale paintings that pay tribute to poets Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Osip Mandelstam and August von Platen by bringing together image and language in a haunting and elegiac display. The exhibition follows Anselm Kiefer’s show at the Grand Palais Éphémère, dedicated to Paul Celan, whose work has had a profound impact on the painter’s practice and his way of seeing the world throughout his career.

Poems are ‘like buoys in the sea’ for Anselm Kiefer, who thought of becoming a writer before he turned to painting. ‘You swim from one to the other,’ he writes as though to himself in his journal in 2017, ‘without them you’re without direction, lost. They are the handholds where something masses together in the infinite expanse.’ Before the poem, however, comes the painting. Bunkers from the Atlantic Wall, buildings in ruins, wheat fields and snow-laden forests emerge from thick impasto in the paintings on view in the exhibition. As he works, fragments of text come to mind, which help to form the final picture. Rather than illustrating one another, language and images resonate through the artist, who, in the words of art historian Andrea Lauterwein, combines a poem’s ‘auditory remanence with the retinal remanence of the image’.