Huge, multi-media encrustations, apocalyptic installations: now in his eightieth year, Anselm Kiefer has become an established behemoth, internationally recognised for his mature style of lyrical destruction. Oxford's Ashmolean brings us the origin story, the 'Complete Unknown' of an angry young man, searching for answers in art and history. The result is uneven, to be sure, but also compelling. It's not a big show but it's not afraid to ask big questions and to accept that the answers are either impossibly complex or deeply unsettling.
Before all that, however, you come face to face with three near-contemporary works. Two elegiac, autumnal reflections on Rilke's poetry, softly red and orange, leaves falling from their surfaces, generate a dreamy serenity. In the centre, the third piece, looms darker, autumn seems to have shifted to night. It is only when you approach, and figures emerge, fleeing, faceless, and the discrete label Whoever Has no House Now catches your eye, that you are drawn into their nightmare. Then the silvered leaves become fallen shrapnel and mellow fruitfulness, explosive fire.
If you can move on - and it takes a lot - the next display drops back fifty or so years. A different time, a different place, but the angry incomprehension which torments the surface of Kiefer's recent canvases is immediately, vividly present. Here is the young man creating a mock-swagger self portrait dressed in his father's Wehrmacht uniform; giving a banned Nazi salute to countryside sliced through with barbed wire; repurposing Second World War propaganda images. Anything to force a conversation about things Germany would rather have kept quiet about. There's anger, there's brazen defiance and there's nothing subtle about it.
The young Kiefer is a man in search of a style. He borrows heavily, from Weimar Expressionists like Dix and Beckmann, from the strong tonality and heavy impasto of Kokoschka, from Nolde and Kollwitz woodcuts. He rifles through German and Nordic history and mythology, from Arminius in the forest through to Wagner. He riffs off popular culture - magazines and teach yourself art books. Amidst all the heavy-handedness there is delicacy: small watercolours, a curation of lilac-y landscapes, winged palettes that suggest fleeting optimism. Equally, you sense the development from scattergun rage to an older, wiser, sniper-accurate subtlety. Kiefer is often portrayed as an artist of bombast, too over-sized and over-loaded, but really he is a master of understatement and detail. His works nag at your mind, pulling threads of reference and meaning, so layered and knotted that you can't dismiss them, can't forget them. He is still the young man standing in the countryside demanding a reckoning.