One of the things I have come to appreciate most about Hindsgavl Festival is that “classical music” is not a genre. It is a conversation spanning centuries, where Renaissance songs, Mahler, Paul Simon and brand-new Danish contemporary music can all illuminate one another.
Monday was one of those days.
The afternoon concert featured the outstanding German Ensemble Ascolta, one of Europe’s leading ensembles for contemporary music, performing Christian Winther Christensen’s Children’s Songs. The ensemble has built an international reputation for pushing the boundaries between concert, theatre and performance, and Christensen’s work seems almost written for precisely that kind of curiosity and openness.
At first glance, Children’s Songs appears to be about children. There are Duplo bricks, toys, fragments of radio sounds, playful gestures and musicians exploring their instruments almost as children investigate a newly discovered object.
But this is not children’s music.
It is music about childhood, viewed from the perspective of adulthood.
Christensen does something remarkably subtle. Rather than recreating childhood itself, he explores our memories and cultural imagination of childhood. Throughout the work, musical references emerge almost like half-forgotten recollections: Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Hindemith’s Wir bauen eine Stadt, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and other echoes from music history appear and disappear again. These quotations are never nostalgic decoration. They become reminders that every generation invents its own image of childhood.
The performance itself reflected this beautifully. Serious musicians of extraordinary technical accomplishment suddenly became explorers, builders and players, assembling colourful Duplo constructions while creating an astonishingly rich sonic landscape.
Later that same day I happened to listen again to Arvo Pärt’s Second Symphony, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste, after reading Jens Carl Sanderhoff’s excellent review of the new complete recording of Pärt’s symphonies.
Quite unexpectedly, I realised that these two very different works are connected.
Pärt’s Second Symphony also contains a musical memory of childhood.
Towards the end of the symphony, after the abrasive modernist sound world, a quotation suddenly appears from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, specifically Sweet Dreams. In his review, Sanderhoff quotes Pärt’s wife Nora explaining why this quotation matters:
“Here childlike innocence and tenderness are set against the cruelty of the surrounding world, and it is the tender side that emerges victorious. If it is regarded merely as a joke, the whole work is destroyed.”
That sentence stayed with me.
In Christensen’s work, childhood is something we adults try to remember but can never quite return to.
In Pärt’s symphony, childhood becomes a moral counterweight to the violence and fragmentation of the adult world.
Both works suggest that childhood is not merely a stage of life. It is a way of seeing the world that remains available to us—if we do not lose it completely.
The evening concert could hardly have provided a sharper contrast.
Soprano Anna Prohaska and pianist Eric Schneider presented Behind the Lines, a programme exploring war through the experiences of ordinary people rather than generals or heroes. Soldiers, mothers, children and those left behind became the protagonists in music spanning more than four centuries. It deserves a post of its own.
And then came the encore.
Paul Simon’s The Side of a Hill from The Paul Simon Songbook (1965).
I have been listening to Paul Simon for decades, yet somehow I had never encountered this remarkable song.
It tells of a seven-year-old boy who “lies asleep in the earth” on the side of a hill, while the war continues to rage below. Generals keep sending soldiers into battle for causes they have long since forgotten, and only a small cloud pauses to weep over the child’s grave.
After an afternoon spent reflecting on childhood through Christian Winther Christensen’s Children’s Songs, and after revisiting Arvo Pärt’s Second Symphony—with its quotation from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album that, as Pärt’s wife Nora explains, sets “childlike innocence and tenderness against the cruelty of the surrounding world”—Paul Simon’s song felt like the inevitable final chapter. It was no longer simply another anti-war song. It became the culmination of a day in which three very different composers, writing in three different musical languages, all returned to the same fragile truth.
Perhaps childhood is not merely something we leave behind.
Perhaps it is the measure by which we should judge the adult world.
And perhaps the most important question raised by all three works is also the simplest:
What becomes of us when we forget what a child’s life is worth?
07/07/2026 13:07:27
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- One of the things I have come to appreciate most about Hindsgavl Festival is that “classical music” is not a genre. It is a conversation spanning centuries, where Renaissance songs, Mahler, Paul Simon and brand-new Danish contemporary music can all illuminate one another.
Monday was one of those days.
The afternoon concert featured the outstanding German Ensemble Ascolta, one of Europe’s leading ensembles for contemporary music, performing Christian Winther Christensen’s Children’s Songs. The ensemble has built an international reputation for pushing the boundaries between concert, theatre and performance, and Christensen’s work seems almost written for precisely that kind of curiosity and openness.
At first glance, Children’s Songs appears to be about children. There are Duplo bricks, toys, fragments of radio sounds, playful gestures and musicians exploring their instruments almost as children investigate a newly discovered object.
But this is not children’s music.
It is music about childhood, viewed from the perspective of adulthood.
Christensen does something remarkably subtle. Rather than recreating childhood itself, he explores our memories and cultural imagination of childhood. Throughout the work, musical references emerge almost like half-forgotten recollections: Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Hindemith’s Wir bauen eine Stadt, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and other echoes from music history appear and disappear again. These quotations are never nostalgic decoration. They become reminders that every generation invents its own image of childhood.
The performance itself reflected this beautifully. Serious musicians of extraordinary technical accomplishment suddenly became explorers, builders and players, assembling colourful Duplo constructions while creating an astonishingly rich sonic landscape.
Later that same day I happened to listen again to Arvo Pärt’s Second Symphony, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste, after reading Jens Carl Sanderhoff’s excellent review of the new complete recording of Pärt’s symphonies.
Quite unexpectedly, I realised that these two very different works are connected.
Pärt’s Second Symphony also contains a musical memory of childhood.
Towards the end of the symphony, after the abrasive modernist sound world, a quotation suddenly appears from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, specifically Sweet Dreams. In his review, Sanderhoff quotes Pärt’s wife Nora explaining why this quotation matters:
“Here childlike innocence and tenderness are set against the cruelty of the surrounding world, and it is the tender side that emerges victorious. If it is regarded merely as a joke, the whole work is destroyed.”
That sentence stayed with me.
In Christensen’s work, childhood is something we adults try to remember but can never quite return to.
In Pärt’s symphony, childhood becomes a moral counterweight to the violence and fragmentation of the adult world.
Both works suggest that childhood is not merely a stage of life. It is a way of seeing the world that remains available to us—if we do not lose it completely.
The evening concert could hardly have provided a sharper contrast.
Soprano Anna Prohaska and pianist Eric Schneider presented Behind the Lines, a programme exploring war through the experiences of ordinary people rather than generals or heroes. Soldiers, mothers, children and those left behind became the protagonists in music spanning more than four centuries. It deserves a post of its own.
And then came the encore.
Paul Simon’s The Side of a Hill from The Paul Simon Songbook (1965).
I have been listening to Paul Simon for decades, yet somehow I had never encountered this remarkable song.
It tells of a seven-year-old boy who “lies asleep in the earth” on the side of a hill, while the war continues to rage below. Generals keep sending soldiers into battle for causes they have long since forgotten, and only a small cloud pauses to weep over the child’s grave.
After an afternoon spent reflecting on childhood through Christian Winther Christensen’s Children’s Songs, and after revisiting Arvo Pärt’s Second Symphony—with its quotation from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album that, as Pärt’s wife Nora explains, sets “childlike innocence and tenderness against the cruelty of the surrounding world”—Paul Simon’s song felt like the inevitable final chapter. It was no longer simply another anti-war song. It became the culmination of a day in which three very different composers, writing in three different musical languages, all returned to the same fragile truth.
Perhaps childhood is not merely something we leave behind.
Perhaps it is the measure by which we should judge the adult world.
And perhaps the most important question raised by all three works is also the simplest:
What becomes of us when we forget what a child’s life is worth? (07/07/2026 13:07:27)
- Every year at Hindsgavl Festival I discover music that stays with me long after the final applause.
This year, one of the defining musical experience for me was undoubtedly the performance of Rune Glerup’s Descriptions of the Ephemeral – Piano Trio No. 2, performed by Trio con Brio Copenhagen.
The trio was written especially for Trio con Brio and premiered in Berlin earlier this year before arriving at Hindsgavl. It consists of five movements—Appearance, Simple, Scherzo Without End, Still Life, Night and Disappearance—whose titles already suggest that this is music concerned less with dramatic events than with fleeting states, transformations and the passing of time. As the programme notes beautifully put it, Glerup invites us to dwell in “the inner life of sound”, where even the smallest changes become meaningful.
Rune Glerup is one of the most interesting voices among the generation of Danish composers born around the turn of the millennium. His music does not seek immediate effect. It asks for attention. It rewards patience.
Trio con Brio Copenhagen could hardly have wished for a closer relationship with the composer. The ensemble—violinist Soo-Jin Hong, cellist Soo-Kyung Hong, and pianist Jens Elvekjær—has collaborated with Glerup for years, having premiered his earlier Movements for Piano Trio in 2017. They possess that rare quality of sounding less like three exceptional musicians and more like a single musical organism. It is no coincidence. The trio consists of two sisters and a married couple, and after decades of performing together they have developed an almost uncanny musical intuition.
What made the experience even richer was that I was fortunate enough to hear the work twice.
The following morning, after an artist talk with Mathias Hammer and Rune Glerup, Trio con Brio performed the work once more. Hearing it for a second time transformed the experience. What had initially seemed elusive suddenly became coherent. Musical ideas that had merely appeared on first hearing now revealed relationships, echoes and memories.
One remark from the artist talk has remained with me. The discussion turned to the importance of silence—to what happens between the notes. Music, Glerup suggested, is not exhausted by what is written in the score. It also unfolds in the spaces, in the acoustics, in the resonance that continues after a tone has disappeared. As one of the reflections during the conversation expressed it: “Go beyond the notation and find something that evolves in the room and with the acoustic. The main thing is not just about notation.”
Listening again with that thought in mind changed everything.
The pauses were no longer absences. They became part of the composition itself. They allowed sounds to breathe, memories to linger, and the listener’s imagination to complete what the notation deliberately leaves unfinished.
Perhaps that is precisely what Glerup means by “the ephemeral”. Music is never simply the notes on the page. It is what briefly comes into being between performers, acoustics and listeners—and then disappears again.
It is remarkable how many internationally significant composers Denmark has produced over the past decades. Bent Sørensen, Hans Abrahamsen, Per Nørgård, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Simon Steen-Andersen, Niels Rønsholdt—and now composers such as Rune Glerup continue to demonstrate that contemporary Danish music remains among the most imaginative anywhere.
Finally, my sincere thanks once again to Cecilia Gaeta, whose beautiful photographs capture the atmosphere of Hindsgavl Festival far better than words alone ever could. (07/05/2026 13:20:48)
- One of the joys of returning to the Hindsgavl Festival year after year is that it constantly surprises me. Just when I think I know what to expect, the festival opens another door.
This evening it was not a chamber concert in the traditional sense, but a cine-concert: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s silent film Faust: Eine deutsche Volkssage from 1926, accompanied live at the piano by Olga Pashchenko. The film, directed by F.W. Murnau and starring Gösta Ekman as Faust and the incomparable Emil Jannings as Mephisto, remains one of the masterpieces of German silent cinema.
What made this performance special was that it did not simply revive an old film. Theatre historian Jed Wentz has reconstructed an accompaniment inspired by historical silent-film practice, creating a carefully curated score from works by Bach, Fanny Hensel, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wagner, Grieg, Scriabin and many others. Rather than improvising, Olga Pashchenko synchronized this remarkable musical collage live with every dramatic turn of the film. It felt neither like watching a film nor attending a piano recital, but something wonderfully in between.
The choice of music was inspired throughout. Olga Pashchenko’s playing was extraordinary, moving effortlessly from Bach’s architectural clarity to Liszt’s demonic virtuosity, from Mendelssohn’s lyricism to Scriabin’s ecstatic sound world. The music did not merely accompany the images—it became part of their emotional language.
And then there is Emil Jannings. His Mephisto is simultaneously terrifying, ironic and strangely seductive. It struck me once again that he is the very same actor who, only a few years later, played Professor Rath in Der Blaue Engel. Few actors have embodied both the devil and human frailty so memorably.
The Faust legend has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. A man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, youth and transcendence is perhaps one of Europe’s greatest metaphors for ambition and its price.
Only a few years ago I finally read Goethe’s original Faust I in Danish, in the magnificent recent translation by Ejler Nyhavn, published by Wunderbuch. It reminded me how much richer the original is than the simplified myth we all think we know.
Long before that I struggled—probably a little too young—with Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and the tragic fate of Adrian Leverkühn. More recently I was deeply impressed by Karl Ove Knausgård’s Natskolen, his striking retelling of the Faust myth in the cultural landscape of the 1980s. It was my first Knausgård novel, and certainly not my last.
Some stories refuse to disappear. They simply find new forms, new centuries, new media—and new audiences.
Finally, my sincere thanks to Cecilia Gaeta, who has generously allowed me to use her wonderful photographs from the Hindsgavl Festival in these posts. They capture the atmosphere far better than my own camera ever could. (07/05/2026 13:01:18)
- One of the great joys of festivals like Hindsgavl is that they constantly remind me how much music I have not yet discovered.
This afternoon’s concert by Rudersdal Kammersolister was probably one of the most fascinating chamber music concerts I have attended in many years. It consisted of three piano quintets that could hardly have been more different, yet together formed a remarkably coherent musical journey.
The programme opened with Julius Röntgen’s Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 100 (1927). Until today I had never knowingly heard a note by Röntgen. That now feels like a significant omission.
The music immediately felt familiar without actually being familiar. It possesses the same combination of lyricism, warmth and quiet depth that I associate with composers such as Grieg and Carl Nielsen. That is perhaps not entirely surprising, as Röntgen counted both among his friends. The melodies seem almost effortless, yet beneath them lies an emotional richness that reveals itself gradually rather than insisting upon attention. This is exactly the sort of music that makes me wonder why certain composers disappear from the standard repertoire while others remain. I know one thing already: this quintet deserves another listen, and I intend to explore much more of Röntgen’s music.
The second work could not have been more different.
We heard the world première of Poul Ruders’ Piano Quintet (2024), written specifically for Rudersdal Kammersolister after the ensemble’s acclaimed performance of his Piano Quartet at Hindsgavl two years ago. It is one of those wonderful stories where a composer is so inspired by an ensemble that he writes a new work for them.
The ensemble’s name almost suggests an especially close relationship with Ruders himself. There is indeed a close artistic connection—but apparently only by coincidence of names.
The new quintet surprised me. Ruders is often associated with dramatic, uncompromising music, yet much of this work felt almost meditative. There was beauty everywhere, but never sentimentality. Strange sonorities and unexpected harmonic colours appeared like brief disturbances on an otherwise calm surface. It was music that invited concentration rather than demanding it.
Then came Boris Tishchenko.
Again a composer I had never encountered before.
His Piano Quintet, Op. 93 (1985) immediately revealed his lineage as one of Dmitri Shostakovich’s most distinguished pupils. Had I not known otherwise, I might easily have believed this to be an unknown Shostakovich score. Yet imitation is not the point. Rather, one senses that both composers inhabited the same historical and moral landscape.
The music is uncompromising, often brutal, full of tension and suppressed violence. It carries with it echoes of the Soviet Union—the weight of history, political oppression and human endurance. Listening to it, one almost hears not only the notes but the society from which they emerged.
Interestingly, after today’s concert I learned that Tishchenko also composed a monumental setting of Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem. That immediately caught my attention. Akhmatova’s poetry has fascinated me for years, not least because it gives voice to precisely the human suffering that Soviet history so often attempted to erase. Suddenly the emotional intensity of Tishchenko’s music seemed even easier to understand.
Perhaps that is what I value most about festivals like Hindsgavl.
Not simply hearing great performances of works I already know, but leaving the concert hall with entirely new composers, new recordings to find, new books to read, and unexpected connections between music, literature and history.
Sometimes the greatest gift a concert can offer is not recognition.
It is discovery. (07/02/2026 15:09:55)
- Every first week of July, Jeanne and I make the same journey. We head for Hindsgavl Festival, as we have done for the past fifteen or twenty years—earlier together with our two sons, and now just the two of us.
There are festivals with bigger budgets and festivals with greater international visibility. But very few combine artistic ambition with intimacy as convincingly as Hindsgavl. The festival’s concept has always appealed to me: world-class chamber music presented in surroundings where musicians and audiences meet naturally, conversations continue after the concerts, and music is allowed to be both intellectually demanding and deeply human.
This year’s opening day could hardly have been stronger.
In the afternoon, Martin Helmchen gave a piano recital that paired Schubert’s early Sonata in A-flat major, D.557, with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Helmchen possesses an extraordinary touch. Every note seemed to have both weight and transparency, and the acoustics of the old barn were simply magnificent.
Pictures at an Exhibition became the highlight of the day for me.
As I listened, I suddenly found myself transported back more than four decades, to my first year in high school. That was when I first encountered the work—not in its original piano version, nor in Ravel’s celebrated orchestral transcription, but through the wonderfully audacious interpretation by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Like so many others of my generation, progressive rock became an unexpected gateway into classical music. Hearing Mussorgsky’s original score today completed a circle that had remained open since those school days.
The evening belonged to Quatuor Ébène, performing two of Beethoven’s greatest string quartets: the Razumovsky Quartet No. 7, Op. 59 No. 1, followed after the interval by Quartet No. 13, Op. 130 with the original Große Fuge finale, Op. 133.
Beethoven’s late quartets continue to astonish nearly two centuries after they were written. They still sound like music from the future.
Unfortunately, I became so absorbed in the performances that I forgot to take a single photograph during either concert.
So instead, here is Schubert.
Our cat.
He seemed perfectly content to represent the day’s music. (07/01/2026 21:21:27)
- I have just finished reading Christian Egander Skov’s Folkeligt skal alt nu være.
It is one of the most thoughtful, nuanced and balanced books I have read in a long time about a subject that has become surprisingly difficult to discuss: what binds a democratic society together.
One of the book’s central arguments is that democracy depends on something deeper than constitutions, elections and the rule of law. Those institutions are indispensable, but they cannot sustain themselves. Democracy also presupposes a shared political community—citizens who recognise one another as belonging to the same civic culture and who therefore accept mutual obligations.
Danish has a word for this: folkelighed. There is no precise English equivalent. Perhaps the closest expression is civic belonging.
It is not folklore. It is not nationalism. And it is certainly not “blood and soil.”
Rather, it describes the shared history, language, institutions, traditions and everyday practices that allow individuals to become part of a political community. It is something people actively choose to participate in and continuously create together.
That distinction struck me.
Like many others, I have largely grown up intellectually within a liberal tradition that celebrates individual freedom and autonomy. I continue to believe deeply in those values. But this book reminded me that individualism also has its limits.
An individual can only flourish within a community that makes individual freedom possible in the first place.
Freedom is not simply the absence of obligations. It also depends upon trust, shared norms and institutions that none of us could create alone.
Reading the book also reminded me of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, which I wrote about some months ago.
The two books are, of course, concerned with different questions. Buber explores the encounter between human beings, whereas Skov is interested in the foundations of democratic society. Yet I could not help noticing a common intuition running through both.
Neither sees the individual as fully self-sufficient.
For Buber, we become fully human through genuine relationships with other people. For Skov, liberal democracy depends upon citizens who are willing to become part of a shared civic community.
In both cases, the I is not diminished by the we. Quite the opposite. The individual becomes more fully itself because it exists in relation to something beyond itself.
Perhaps that is one of the enduring paradoxes of liberal democracy.
We rightly celebrate individual liberty. Yet liberty cannot sustain itself indefinitely unless free individuals also choose to belong.
We often think democracy begins with rights.
Books like this remind me that it may begin even earlier—with the willingness to say we. (06/30/2026 16:43:42)
- This Tuesday was a special day for Jeanne, Vilhelm and me. Most of all, it was a special day for our youngest son, Jens.
He sat his final examination before graduating from Aurehøj Gymnasium in Gentofte, just north of Copenhagen.
These three years have been a wonderful time for Jens. Not only because Aurehøj was – and remains – a remarkable place to learn, but because the years between adolescence and adulthood are among the most formative in any life. Friendships are forged, interests become passions, and vague dreams slowly begin to take shape.
Looking at Jens in his student cap outside the school, I could not help thinking back to another photograph. Forty-five years ago, I stood on exactly the same steps, in front of exactly the same building, wearing my own newly acquired student cap as a freshly graduated Aurehøj student.
At the time, I had no idea where life would take me. I certainly could not have imagined that one day I would return to those same steps with my own son.
Graduation season is a time of celebration. But it is also slightly melancholy. Every transition from one chapter of life to the next contains a small farewell. Something ends so that something new can begin.
For Jens and his classmates, a door has closed and many others have opened.
For parents, moments like these are reminders of how quickly time passes.
And perhaps that is why old photographs matter so much. They remind us that while generations change, some places, traditions and hopes endure.
Congratulations, Jens. (06/25/2026 08:15:47)
- One of the pleasures of growing older is discovering that your ears can still be surprised.
This year, I once again attended the KLANG Festival together with my old friend Martin Malgreen, chair of the festival’s board. KLANG has for many years been one of Copenhagen’s most important platforms for experimental music, creating a space where curiosity matters more than familiarity and where listening itself becomes an active practice.
On Wednesday evening we moved through three very different concerts.
The first, KLINGGGG by Wassermann, Anker and Parkins, was primarily acoustic. The human voice played the leading role, although often in forms that barely resembled what we normally think of as singing. Strange sounds, whispers, clicks, extended vocal techniques and unexpected interactions between the performers constantly challenged the boundary between language and sound.
Then came Ann Rosén’s Walking in the Now. Here, the visual dimension became central. Watching marks and gestures emerge on the screen while the sound unfolded created an experience somewhere between concert, drawing and performance art. It was a reminder that listening is not always something we do only with our ears.
Finally, Jena Jang’s Necrocore – Somatic Noise. An intense and uncompromising noise performance. Dense walls of sound, physical vibrations and electronic distortion transformed the concert hall into something closer to an environment than a musical performance. At moments it felt almost less like listening to music and more like being inside it.
Three concerts. Three radically different approaches to sound.
What I admire about festivals like KLANG is that they remind us that music is not a genre but a question. What counts as music? What counts as listening? And how much of our understanding of art is really just habit?
Not every experiment succeeds. Not every work speaks equally strongly to every listener.
But curiosity remains one of the most underrated cultural virtues.
And KLANG continues to reward it. (06/14/2026 20:34:20)
- One of the privileges of still being a lawyer, but no longer a full-time partner, is that I can spend more time advising artists and cultural organisations—not on legal matters, but on strategy, governance, fundraising, and the long-term challenge of building sustainable institutions.
I have had the pleasure of advising A Kassen for quite a number of years.
Last Thursday I travelled to Lund for the opening of their new exhibition at Skissernas Museum.
Founded in 2004, A Kassen has spent more than two decades pursuing a collective artistic practice that often begins with things already present in the world. As the curator pointed out during the opening, the group borrowed its name from the Danish unemployment insurance funds. In much the same way, their art frequently starts by taking hold of existing objects, systems, and structures and moving them into a new context.
The exhibition is less a collection of individual works than a miniature city that visitors walk through. Traffic poles from Copenhagen. Urban furniture. Signage. Geometric forms. Fragments of public space relocated into the museum and made strange again.
Several works explore the relationship between geometry and perception. According to the curator, algorithms have been used to “straighten out” faces and objects, translating them into abstract forms. The result is both playful and unsettling. We recognise the world, yet we also see how easily it can be reduced to patterns and systems.
What I have always appreciated about A Kassen is their ability to move effortlessly between humour and seriousness. A traffic signal becomes a sculpture. A rubbish bin becomes architecture. A barrier becomes a drawing in space.
The exhibition raises questions about public space, authority, and how we organise the environments we inhabit. But it does so without preaching. Instead, it invites us to look again at things we thought we already understood.
Perhaps that is one of art’s most important functions.
Not to show us something entirely new.
But to make us see the familiar once more. (06/14/2026 20:07:44)
- On our way back to the airport in Paris, Jeanne and I managed to squeeze in a 15-minute stop at Anselm Kiefer’s Nymphäum at Thaddaeus Ropac in Pantin.
Fifteen minutes is nowhere near enough for Anselm Kiefer. But it was enough to remind me why he remains one of the most compelling painters alive.
I have loved Kiefer’s work ever since seeing his monumental exhibition at the Doge’s Palace in Venice a few years ago. Alongside Gerhard Richter and the recently deceased Georg Baselitz, he belongs to that remarkable generation of post-war German artists who spent decades wrestling with memory, history, mythology and the ruins of the twentieth century.
In Nymphäum, Kiefer turns to the nymphs of Greek mythology. Yet these are not the graceful figures of classical painting. They emerge only partially from forests, water, darkness and layers of paint. They appear and disappear at the same time.
What struck me most is how the exhibition is also a conversation with other artists across centuries.
One painting echoes Edvard Munch’s The Scream, although Kiefer lets the scream dissolve into vegetation and geological time rather than existential panic. Other works recall Gustav Klimt, where illuminated city windows shimmer like mosaics behind foliage. The exhibition text also points to resonances with Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings, and even Aby Warburg’s famous studies of the “Ninfa” figure wandering through Western art.
This has always been one of Kiefer’s great strengths. His paintings never stand alone. They feel like archaeological sites where myths, literature, philosophy, religion, art history and personal memory have all been buried together and are slowly re-emerging through the surface.
The result is strangely beautiful.
The nymphs in these paintings are neither fully present nor fully absent. They survive as traces, memories and transformations — much like culture itself. (06/14/2026 15:04:02)