Anselm Kiefer Returns to White Cube Bermondsey: What to Expect from His New Paintings in London

Few living painters arrive in a gallery with as much weight — literal and historical — as Anselm Kiefer. From 25 November 2026 to 24 January 2027, White Cube Bermondsey presents a solo exhibition of his recent paintings, turning the gallery’s vast South London halls into one of the defining painting shows of the British winter season.

Who is Anselm Kiefer?

Born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, in the closing months of the Second World War, Kiefer belongs to the generation of German artists who refused to let the recent past remain unspoken. In the late 1960s and 1970s he confronted the taboos of post-war Germany head on, and from that confrontation grew a body of work that treats painting as a site of memory: landscapes that are also battlefields, libraries that are also ruins, fields of wheat that are also elegies.

Since the early 1990s he has lived and worked largely in France, where his studios have expanded into something closer to architecture than workshop. That scale is essential to understanding the paintings: they are not made to be glanced at, but to be stood before.

A painter of matter, not just image

Kiefer’s canvases are built rather than painted in the conventional sense. Thick oil and emulsion share the surface with straw, ash, sand, clay, shellac, dried plants and, most famously, lead — a metal he values for its density, its alchemical associations and its capacity to oxidise and change over time. Surfaces crack, sag and darken. The result is a kind of painting that ages in front of you, and that makes time itself one of its materials.

His subjects range across German history and myth, the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, Kabbalistic cosmology, alchemy and, more recently, cosmology and physics. Words are often inscribed directly on the canvas in his looping handwriting — titles, names, lines of verse — so that the painting reads as both landscape and text.

Kiefer and London

London audiences know Kiefer well. White Cube has worked with him for decades, and its Bermondsey space — one of the largest commercial galleries in Europe — has repeatedly been reshaped around his installations. The Royal Academy’s major retrospective in 2014 further consolidated his British following. A new presentation of recent paintings therefore lands in a city that has watched his work evolve closely, and will be read against that history.

What we know about the 2026 exhibition

White Cube has announced the show as a solo exhibition of recent paintings by the artist. At the time of writing, the gallery has not released a full list of works, a title or a press text; we will update this article as details are published. What is already clear is the timing: opening in late November, the show will anchor London’s gallery calendar through the holiday period and into the new year, after Frieze week and well before the spring auction season.

Why this exhibition matters for collectors and painters

• Late-career consolidation: recent work by a painter now in his eighties offers a view of how a lifelong vocabulary — lead, ash, inscription, ruin — is being distilled rather than repeated.
• Painting at architectural scale: Bermondsey’s long, top-lit galleries are one of the few commercial spaces able to show Kiefer’s largest canvases as intended.
• A lesson in material thinking: for working painters, few artists demonstrate more clearly how the choice of material can carry meaning as forcefully as the image itself.

Plan your visit

Where: White Cube Bermondsey, 144–152 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ. When: 25 November 2026 – 24 January 2027. Check the official exhibition page for opening hours and holiday closures. Full details, social links and a map are on our Anselm Kiefer exhibition listing, and more openings in London, Paris, Istanbul, Ankara, Spain, Dubai and New York are collected on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.