Anselm Kiefer at The White Cube

The wings were never meant to carry something so heavy. But there they were, opening for us, in the center of the White Cube’s 9x9x9 room: Outstretched and captured in the seconds before they would lift their piping bones, flap fringed metal wings, and carry the books upon books of lead and steel books to some kind of heaven. But buried in a time known only by the artist, the feathers of this uncertain creature had changed. In the opaque sheen of metal, we nearly connoted their once swan whiteness. Yet their imagined featherweight frames had since malformed into a 16-foot long catch weight. Strained and struggling upward, the being that first transfixed us could not bear itself. And we could not bear it.