Anselm Kiefer review – terrifying odyssey through a cursed world

What’s bugging Anselm Kiefer? At 74, he is not only acclaimed and successful, but bubbling over with a creative energy. It flows with the unceasing power of the Rhine through his latest outpouring of 46 monumental new artworks – it’s easy to picture a few Rhinemaidens swimming about. But, at the end, you feel bereft and devastated. Kiefer comes on like a Wagnerian showman only to collapse in unshakeable, incurable melancholy. His horror vacui is real and he knows it: all this art is just a way of putting off that final confrontation with the void.

Kiefer has found a new way to represent nature for our age of climate crisis. His new paintings are startling apocalyptic visions of a death-infected earth. They make landscape so immediate, you almost feel twigs crunch underfoot and catch your breath turning to steam in a snowy wood. Then you see an axe in the undergrowth, its rusty blade the colour of blood. The boundless tangle of nature has no chance against the iron edge of human violence.

This menacing tool materialises repeatedly in a series of new paintings called Der Gordische Knoten, the Gordian knot in ancient legend, whose unpickable entanglement Alexander the Great simply cut through. That word “painting” may conjure up an image of something flat and framed. But the axes in these artworks are real – and so are the sticks and twigs that poke out of matted, cracked surfaces. In the biggest of the Gordian Knot cycle, golden waves of wheat, blown in the breeze, are arrayed like a flowing frieze of abundance. Real branches daubed with gold have been used to create their colossal stalks. But two axes hang in the gleaming fullness, waiting to devastate this cornucopian field. This earth is cursed.

The cycle of Gordian Knot paintings is the most modest in the show. Another room is given over to panoramic blasts of brown and black that map sweeping vistas of desolate fields. A road twines through a morass of mud and collaged sticks. Lines of fence poles vanish in the distance. These scenes are drawn in black on a vertiginous scale. Kiefer uses perspective, the Renaissance technique of showing the real world shrinking towards a single vanishing point, to define his landscapes – but the perspective view is a transparency on top of a muddy tumult of colour and texture, with real, 3D stuff stuck over that in turn. From the right distance, the picture of a landscape can be read clearly, like a painting by Van Gogh. Go closer and the picture dissolves in a mess of bulges and muck.

For we know, of course, that nature is more complex than a picture. These landscapes are entitled Superstrings, a reference to string theory, an influential idea in contemporary physics that seeks to unify quantum mechanics with Einstein’s relativity. For Kiefer, the appeal of this theory seems to be its recognition of the mystery and ambiguity of reality – the Gordian knot that is life, the universe and everything. Or maybe he just likes a good tangle. Alexander represents brutal instrumental thinking that cuts through the quantum entanglements of life, because it can’t accept complexity. In the corridor of White Cube, he’s created a kind of Viking mead hall of vitrines whose twisted branches, gold spiralling lines and mathematical equations combine string theory with Norse myth to convey the gorgeous sensual mystery of being.

So nature is a great web of string and we are driven to cut it to bits. But this vision is too neat, too simple for Kiefer. Something else pulls at him.

The main gallery at White Cube Bermondsey is already pretty bleak in its featureless emptiness. Kiefer makes it work for him by heightening the chill, turning the White Cube into a morgue for Europe. Snow-covered landscapes with none of the cheer of Bruegel stretch away to infinity. They are marked with sticks as black as gravestones and nets that catch at nothing. Kiefer’s science reading clearly hasn’t cheered him up. The curvy grids of space-time become horrible wire traps in a devastated nowhere. We might be on the no-man’s land of the Ukraine border. Anyway, this place has got death in its hard black furrows.

Kiefer’s sadness is overpowering and can have only one root. He is still painting the Holocaust. Still refusing to put the biggest, blackest fact in modern history to one side. By creating fullness, Kiefer makes you feel the emptiness he needs you to acknowledge in these vast depressing fields.

• Anselm Kiefer: Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot is at White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 26 January.