Anselm Kiefer is putting the finishing touches to his exhibition Finnegans Wake with the help of a forklift truck. The huge gallery at White Cube Bermondsey has been all but filled with a mound of shattered concrete surrounded by barbed wire, like a bombed second world war bunker. I watch as the wiry, bespectacled 78-year-old lion of German art directs the drop of a final piece of rubble into place, sending a rusty chunk of metal crashing on its side. “Perfect,” he says.
When we sit down to talk he tells me how he hacked out this broken mass from his studio. “There was a floor and I cut it from the sides and it fell down. And it was wonderful! Really great. And I had the idea, this is fantastic together with Finnegans Wake, because it’s the beginning of something, not the end. It’s the beginning. So I brought it here.”
