ANSELM KIEFER

(Donaueschingen 1945 – lives and works among others in Paris)Nigredo-Albedo-Rubedo. 2006.Oil, emulsion, lead, wood, terracotta soil, fabric and wire, also 5 dried sunflowers. Bound as a book with 9 pages, each page consisting of cardboard and fibreboard.Each 196 x 140 cm. Sunflowers max. 430 cm.

Kiki Smith, Heute, 2008

“Ms. Smith, whose younger sister Beatrice died with AIDS in 1988, has long been fixated on the fragility of the human body. In her 2008 sculpture “Heute (Now),” left, on view in Ms. Smith’s Brooklyn Museum show, a coffin in unfinished knotty pine holds meticulous lamp-worked glass dandelions, produced by the glass artist David Willis, sprouting from its interior. (It also represents another thread that has run through her work for decades: an interest in unusual juxtapositions of materials.) Although the date of the work corresponds to the 20th anniversary of her sister’s death, Ms. Smith said she was not conscious of this when she made it; rather, the piece speaks to her fascination with natural-world cycles of death and renewal.”

—NY Times 

Who

apoemaday:

by Sylvia Plath

The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in,
Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth.
October’s the month for storage.

The shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach:
Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.
I am at home here among the dead heads.

Let me sit in a flowerpot,
The spiders won’t notice.
My heart is a stopped geranium.

If only the wind would leave my lungs alone.
Dogsbody noses the petals. They bloom upside down.
They rattle like hydrangea bushes.

Mouldering heads console me,
Nailed to the rafters yesterday:
Inmates who don’t hibernate.

Cabbageheads: wormy purple, silver-glaze,
A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but green-hearted,
Their veins white as porkfat.

O the beauty of usage!
The orange pumpkins have no eyes.
These halls are full of women who think they are birds.

This is a dull school.
I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet,
Without dreams of any sort.

Mother, you are the one mouth
I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness
Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.

I said: I must remember this, being small.
There were such enormous flowers,
Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely.

The hoops of blackberry stems made me cry.
Now they light me up like an electric bulb.
For weeks I can remember nothing at all.