For this FSA Inspiration, we highlight Anselm Kiefer’s floor-to-ceiling, mixed-media painting installation, “Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce” (“These Writings, When Burned, Will Finally Give Some Light”) at the Pavilion Palazzo Ducale inside the Doge Palace. Kiefer was invited by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezi (MUVE) to create works in conversation with the Sala dello Scrutino, a 14th century Venetian Gothic building, on view during Venice Biennale 2022.

In a statement in The Art Newspaper, co-curator of the exhibition, Gabriella Belli remarks: “‘The show’s title comes from an obscure 20th-century Venetian philosopher, Andrea Emo’ […] ‘to whose thought Kiefer feels very close.’ It suggests that ‘producing and destroying are one’, she says, and the new works use Venetian motifs to comment on the artist’s perennial themes of creation, destruction and transformation. Completed during the pandemic, the works have a very precise but non-narrative order.”