How German Is It

I haven't been across to the National Gallery of Australia much lately. My mistake.

On Friday I had a wander through the international galleries. In the middle of one room is a book. A very large book. Imagine a book, standing on the floor, about as tall as you and me, opened back against the spine so that the pages fan out in a circle. You can walk around this book and peer in at the pages. But the book is a dark, kind of bronze colour, and the detail is quite hard to make out. And, of course, it is not a real book. It is a recent piece by Anselm Keifer. It's not exactly a sculpture and not exactly a painting. It's called "The Secret Lives of Plants". I will be coming over to look at it quite a bit. I have always been drawn to Keifer's work. I don't have any idea why. It requires work. It's also very bleak. The Gallery has for a long time had another one of his pieces, a large monochrome painting with a big piece of industrial machinery embedded in the centre; there are train tracks heading away from you at the bottom of the painting. There's not much doubt as to what the subject matter is (and if there was any doubt, it is usually hung near a large Sigmar Polke painting of a guard tower). And yet when our niece came to stay with us for her 10th birthday a year or two ago, this is a girl who is very fond of horses, she picked that out as her favourite painting in the Gallery.

And in the next room, which at present is laid out as a large, cavernous space filled with abstract expressionist and minimalist works, with no sculptures or anything else on the floor to get in the way of the majestic paintings (here is the Gallery's Motherwell; here's its Rothko; over there's "Blue Poles" (which completely astounds me every time I see it)). And on the wall opposite Blue Poles there's another new acqisition: a 1984 Gerhard Richter oil painting, abstract, like nothing I've seen of his before (I'm more used to the more photo realist - if that's the right term - work, like the Gallery's portrait of Gilbert + George) but completely gorgeous, such vivid greens and yellows. It works well opposite the Pollock, offering a possibly calming, possibly malevalent contrast to Blue Poles' sheer joy.

So, two recently acquired German works. I would like to think that this means that somewhere there might lurk some of those stunning, large-scale photographic works of, say, Thomas Struth or Andreas Gursky, which, given the Gallery's lack of a permanent photography gallery, are just waiting for an opportunity to be shown. Or then again, maybe not.