Anselm Kiefer is one of those artists that make you jealous. His work is the glorious evidence of limitless experimentation, an inspired combination of reverential, romantic imagery and old-fashioned messy, mucky fun. Kiefer’s working process and working environment were thrillingly exposed last year in Sophie Fiennes breathtaking film Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, a documentary study of his sprawling, monumental studio complex in Barjac, France. The film portrayed Kiefer readying enormous canvasses, working with industrial techniques and materials, manning boiling furnaces and great cranes, ascending mountains of basalt and peat rock, and constructing towering concrete monuments, sculpting the landscape. This gritty creative playground exists now as a ‘concept art organism’ never finished, but evolving as work is created and destroyed.
 
After witnessing the extraordinary birthplace of much of Kiefer’s work, seeing it then installed in a sterile, white gallery changes it entirely. The works here at the White Cube’s new show are argillaceous artefacts, encrusted with thick dust and earth as if they were centuries old, hauled from the ground itself. Twenty-four cast iron frames are bolted to the gallery walls like the vast factory windows, through which we see Kiefer’s salted seascapes. These are costal photographs, depicting breakers and shining sands, through mounds of clay and raw corrosive compounds. Many are streaked with the brilliant blues and pinks of copper sulphate, glowing scars from the photograph’s torture via electrolysis. Kiefer commands these raw materials with such aggression and masculinity, and yet produces these images that, while they bear the cracks of scratches of their maker, are calming, delicate, even ethereal. The light pinks of the copper recall Turner’s watery sunsets, and glimpsing the ocean through the gaps in the caked surfaces is to kindle an emotion many of us share; a great respect and longing for the freedom and expanse of the sea.
 
The scale and number of these works add to this effect, though somewhat infuriatingly the ‘Cube have stacked them so high on their lovely walls that the upper most frames are almost completely obscured by the reflection from the large ceiling lights. It’s a shame, because it undermines the gravitas these images have as a collective whole, but it’s a small curatorial oversight in an otherwise inviting and balanced show. Several vitrines stand in the centre of the room, each one containing a book, again photographs of the sea, this time annotated with graceful geometric designs and equations. These too are presented as relics, archived and stored, protected in their glass cases. The books themselves, just like the photographs on the walls, are tactile and unpolished, and exude Kiefer’s wonderful hands-on charm. Again here Kiefer subverts these seascapes, this time with diagrams drawn in thick chalk and graphite, depicting kinetic experiments and blueprints for machines of subtle and intricate balance. These are objects that one immediately wants to hold and to treasure, and that’s what Kiefer does best; combines elements so simple and elegant to produce work that you just want to be around.
 
Upstairs the small room is adorned with more photographs, again grainy black and white seascapes, though this time a body floats in the water of each image, the shining bald head of Kiefer himself, now immersed the deep. This room seems personal and reverential in comparison to the clay-splattered main gallery, as if one is watching a sacred and private ritual. In each photograph the artist is surrounded by a swirling tempest of pearlescent copper sulphate, vulnerable against The Waves. These atavistic works are existential and honest, as Kiefer plumbs the depths of mankind’s ancient bond with the ocean. I first admired Kiefer here in 2009, back then it was for his skill as a painter of terra firma; crumbling adobe factories in India and thorn-ridden, barbed forest landscapes. Now one witnesses that his skill as a user of earth, it’s minerals and sediments, is as honed and polished as his eye for romantic aesthetic. This new show, though small, beautifully couples the physical with the emotional, and sees Kiefer riding these Waves of Sea and Love, washing us away with him.