Montreal

Well it was a whilwind trip to Montreal - we really only had an afternoon and evening there and then we zoomed back down the highway for a birthday party. We left with a dinner recommendation in hand - Peter said we should try the best Thai food in Montreal at Chao Phraya on Laurier, near Sainte-Laurent. Since it is the only Thai food we've tried in Montreal, it is a little hard to compare, but I will say we enjoyed a fantastic dinner! There are many choices for a dinner out in Montreal - this one is well worth a try.

We didn't go for the food though. We drove to Montreal to see the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Musee D'Art Contemporain de Montreal - Heaven and Earth - before it closed. This huge exhibition explored about 35 years of Kiefer's work, with over 50 works and a healthy representation of new work. In Kiefer's words, "In my painting, I tell stories to show what lies behind history. I make a hole and I go through it. Kiefer has exhibited regularly since 73. His work just exploded by about 75 and in 1980 he represented Germany at the Venice Biannale. This was the first major exhibit of Kiefer's work to be shown in Canada.

This show knocked my socks off. When I was in University in the 80s, Kiefer was associated in my mind with a resurgence of figurative painting in both Europe and America, but looking at the work together in the context of this exhibition, I see little relationship with broad movement. Kiefer: "My spirituality is not New Age. It has been with me since I was a child. I know that in the last few decades religion has been made shiny and new. It's like a business creating a new product. They are selling salvation. I'm not interested in being saved. I'm interested in reconstructing symbols. It's about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven."

Kiefer makes impossible paintings. First, many of them are huge. At the same time, they can be both incredibly delicate (one has a dead sunflower stock wired up to it) and absurdly heavy (consider big head-sized rock-like chunks of lead hanging from the paintings by wires). Consider a giant painting whose image is mostly described by sunflower seeds. Consider an oversized steel bookshelf holding a collection of huge lead books. The gallery has film room with a video playing of the unloading and unpacking of the exhibition from a tractor-trailer to the gallery with forklifts and plenty of man-power. The paintings have thick convoluted cracking textures, stuff roughly affixed to the surface, and often objects attached. Fantastic

The show includes a few early paintings and books as well as the 'mature work'. It was very interesting to me to see his ideas evolve. It seemed like he had the images he needed but didn't know how to nail them down, how to make them come to life. Then, there they were - it all seemed to come together - work after work after work.

It isn't too often that an exhibition charges me up this way. I left feeling refueled, my confidence in painting renewed.