The Green He Grows: Anselm Kiefer's Sediment of Electrolysis

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 29, 2026 | 3 MIN READ The Green He Grows: Anselm Kiefer's Sediment of Electrolysis At a Glance Kiefer doesn't buy the green in his new Gagosian paintings. He grows it, running current through a copper-salt bath and harvesting the verdigris sediment that forms. Here is what that means at the bench, and what a collector takes home. There is a green in Anselm Kiefer ’s new painting s that nobody sells in a tube. It’s a deep verdigris, the colour of weathered bronze, and he makes it by passing an electrical current through a bath of copper and salts until a sediment forms, then working that sediment into the surface. I read about it in Janne Sirén’s consideration of the new work for Gagosian , written for “Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still,” the show that opened 15 May at 541 West 24th Street. The gallery lists the materials plainly: “oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, collaged canvas, gold leaf , and sediment of electrolysis.” That last phrase is the one I keep turning over. Why growing your own pigment is a different act than buying it Most painters, me included, buy colour. Open a tube of viridian or phthalo green and out comes a pigment a factory standardized for hue, opacity and lightfastness. It will behave. Kiefer’s green does the opposite of behave, and that is the point. Verdigris, copper green, is one of the oldest and least stable pigments in the history of painting. Medieval and Renaissance painters used it for its astonishing intensity and then watched it darken, brown, and sometimes eat through the layers around it. Conservators still handle it with caution. Kiefer knows all of this. He isn’t avoiding the instability. He is enlisting it. And “sediment of electrolysis” tells me something specific about the surface. This is not a green laid down as a smooth film. It is a deposit, a grain, a crust harvested from a chemical bath and pressed into the work. It sits as matter, not as paint. Light meets a granular, mineral sediment completely differently than it meets an even layer of tube colour; it scatters, goes matte and metallic, catches like oxidized bronze. Even from the material list alone, these surfaces are clearly built up rather than painted across. He doesn’t buy the green. He grows it. What a collector actually takes home with a Kiefer Here is the part worth being honest about. When a collector lives with a painting made from copper salts and electrolytic sediment, shellac and collaged canvas and gold leaf, they are not living with a fixed image. They are hosting an ongoing chemical reaction. Kiefer’s surfaces are well known among conservators for exactly this: they shed, they crack, they keep oxidizing. The work is, in a real sense, still happening on the wall. For the right collector that is the whole appeal, the most extreme version of what makes an original matter: the artist’s hand here is a process the owner keeps alive. For the wrong collector it is a maintenance commitment nobody mentioned at the sale. B