Where Matter Refuses to Settle: Inside Anselm Kiefer’s Nymphäum.

Somewhere between a ruin and a reservoir, Nymphäum resists the tidy expectations we bring to exhibitions. It does not announce itself; it accumulates. By the time you realise you are looking, something else has already begun to look back.

At Thaddaeus Ropac’s Pantin space in Paris, Anselm Kiefer has assembled more than twenty paintings that feel less like works than like deposits - slow-forming strata of pigment, ash, straw, metal residue. They carry the density of something that has been left alone for too long and, in that neglect, has begun to think for itself.

The title gestures toward the nymphaeum, those ancient grottoes where water gathered and minor gods were granted a kind of architectural pause. But Kiefer’s version is not a place of offering. It is closer to an afterimage of one - what remains when devotion has evaporated but the site still remembers being addressed. There is no clear threshold here. You are already inside it before you know how to behave.

Kiefer has always worked as though history were not behind us but underfoot - something to be disturbed rather than recalled. In this new body of work, he turns to nymphs, though not in any illustrative sense. They are not staged; they are coaxed out. Figures appear and withdraw with the uncertainty of something half-remembered: a face caught in the grain of a tree, a presence dissolving into water before it can be fully recognised. They behave less like subjects than like consequences.

Blink and you’ll miss it - look longer and it might start looking back.

What is unexpected is where they surface. Not only in groves or mountains, but in cities - if these can still be called cities. Kiefer’s urban works glow with a disarming warmth: façades rising in grids of gold, windows lit with an almost devotional steadiness. It recalls the hushed intimacy of The Kiss, though stripped of its embrace. These buildings do not hold people; they hold light. And even that feels temporary. Across their surfaces, something else begins to push through - thick, vegetal incursions that refuse the discipline of architecture. The paint does not describe vines so much as enact their insistence, bulging outward, breaching the idea of surface altogether.

There is no romance in this return of nature. It does not restore; it reclaims. Kiefer’s long engagement with the scorched terrains of post-war Europe lingers here, but the emphasis has shifted. These are not landscapes after catastrophe; they are landscapes that have absorbed catastrophe so completely it no longer needs to declare itself. Growth, in this context, feels less like healing than like continuation under altered conditions.

In Die Oreaden (2025), a work that stretches toward the scale of a horizon, the myth of mountain nymphs is not retold so much as worn down. The figures are there, but only just - pressed into the mass of the terrain, as though gravity had taken hold of them mid-transformation. The sky burns softly above, indifferent. It is difficult not to think of Ovid here, though Kiefer abandons the clarity of metamorphosis. There is no before and after. Only a prolonged middle, where forms hesitate between states.

Water, as ever in Kiefer, is where things become most uncertain. In works named for Thetis, Nikaia, Actaea, the surface seems less painted than dredged - thick with silt, layered with fragments that suggest submersion rather than depiction. The nymphs do not enter the water; they are slowly composed by it. Looking at these works is like trying to recall a story while it is still being written somewhere else. The image never settles long enough to be fully possessed.

Material carries the argument. Straw, chalk, shellac, charcoal - nothing arrives innocently. Even the use of electrolysis sediment, that strange mineral trace left by electrical current, feels less like innovation than like inevitability. Matter here is always mid-process, always altering its own terms. Kiefer has often invoked alchemy, but what emerges is not mysticism so much as a stubborn literalism: transformation not as metaphor, but as condition. To make is to undo and to begin again, often simultaneously.

And then, briefly, the faces. They do not present themselves; they surface. A suggestion of eyes within a field of ash, a mouth caught in the branching of a form that might be root or vein. They recall something like portraiture, but without the assurance that a person stands behind them. Instead, they feel like moments when the landscape falters and allows something interior to leak outward. Not expression, exactly. More like exposure.

The triptych screens offer a gesture that could be mistaken for care. They stand like provisional shelters within the larger field, as though something fragile might gather behind them. But even here, protection feels conditional. A shift in air would be enough to undo it. There is no illusion that anything held here can be held for long.

What Nymphäum ultimately proposes is not a return to myth, but a recalibration of attention. The nymphs are not relics of a distant belief system; they are a way of naming a relationship we have not quite managed to extinguish. Between human and environment, between matter and memory, between what we recognise and what resists recognition. Kiefer does not clarify these relations. He thickens them.

You leave the exhibition with less certainty than you arrived with, but also with a sharpened sense of proximity - to things usually kept at a distance. Surfaces that refuse to stay surfaces. Histories that behave like weather. Figures that appear only long enough to complicate what you thought you were looking at.

Somewhere in all of this, the idea of the nymphaeum persists. Not as a place, but as a condition: a site where something gathers, briefly, before dispersing again. Not sacred, exactly. But not empty either.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac.