On walking in you are handed a safety notice – avoid touching the works, walls etc they are made of lead; if you do wash your hands; children to be supervised.

Lead is a carcinogen but here the walls of White Cube are lined with it, it’s everywhere. It’s meant to be oppressive, instead I’m mildly irritated.

I want to be overwhelmed and worried about the impact of the far right, the terrible outcomes. The truth of it does worry me, especially today in the current climate, now. But not here, not in the White Cube because instead I’m worried that so much money was thrown at this work and at this curation.  I’m not sure the oppressed of today would even understand it as anything other than excess.  I’d rather see an expression of poverty  as the natural outcome of oppression than these bleak riches. The art is a mimicry of the infrastructure of fascism but I couldn’t help but feel what was on show was the artists power and wealth.

I’m told it took two weeks and cranes and careful handling to hang this exhibition and I’m suprised at the speed. It’s an impressive show but I’m not emotionally engaged, it’s over the top.

In the lead lines corridor are lead lined beds and leading to rooms with lead sculptures and huge, amazing lead lined paintings of catastrophe falling heavily on the depictions of large, concrete towers. Kiefer actually casts steel portacabins in concrete and creates these towers as sculptures before painting them on his many panelled canvases. Although we never see the towers these paintings and sketchbooks are the highlights, the landscapes are barren and defeated, layered in plaster, lead and paint. They call to mind Aleppo or Homs, albeit a different architecture. Kiefer’s use of colour and scale and skill in the paintings is amazing and for me it outperforms the metal excesses of the sculpture and the curation. I wonder if he really needs to cast the gallery in lead to show us these epic and broken landscapes. I might have been less distracted if he hadn’t.

To some extent both this show and the previous Gormley have failed to speak to me of the current time even though their subject matters should. But as for Anselm I’d go, dodge the endless melted bullets that line the walls and form the sculptures and enjoy the paintings.