In the Land of the Cyclops by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard [Knausgaard, Karl Ove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

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Watercolour is a medium that demands speed and cannot be reworked: what is there must be left there – one doesn’t get a second chance. It is an art of the instant, and Kiefer’s earlier paintings have often aimed at the opposite, spaces where time passes so slowly that it appears almost suspended, built up of layer upon layer of material. But although this, along with the delight in colour and the small format, distinguishes these paintings from Kiefer’s earlier, often monumental works in muted colours, the greatest difference lies in the motifs, all these female figures. For one remarkable characteristic of Kiefer’s art is that after the early 1970s it became drained of human figures, and ever since has been nearly devoid of people. There are no faces looking at us or looking away, no eyes or mouths, no bodies doing anything either alone or with others, no hands or elbows, breasts or bellies. Humankind in Kiefer’s work has been represented as traces and signs, the things we leave behind.

Kiefer himself is also strikingly absent or distant: when one looks at a painting by Oskar Kokoschka or by Van Gogh, to take two artists Kiefer has related to in his art, it feels not only as if one is seeing what they are seeing, but also that one is feeling what they felt, and that in looking at their pictures one is close to someone, a particular person in the world, unique and idiosyncratic.

Not so with Kiefer’s art, where the individual has no place: not because his paintings are turned inward towards their own materiality – though they do this too – but because they are turned towards the space of human activity, the space in which we appear and vanish, and while that space is constant, our activity in it is fleeting and transitory.

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