Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, the big daddy of memorial painting, is not the kind of artist for whom a new show means new ideas and forms. Here we have further disfigured landscapes, where themes are as cumbersome as the drag of mud-thick paint. Romantic mysticism is rendered ghoulish and theatrical in the crypt-like basement of White Cube Mason's Yard: gothick forest scenes feature thickets of real bramble where stained shirts float like lost souls.

At Hoxton Square, smashed, charred pottery creates a three-dimensional path across the gallery floor into vast images of pyramid-like mud-brick ovens. They are based on photos the artist took in India. Yet the desert that seems to have been churned by so many migrating feet could be Biblical; the monstrous kilns in which bricks are baked to make more ovens, bear echoes of the Holocaust. The disasters of history just go on and on, as relentless and unchanging as Kiefer's project is static.

It's often said that we're now too ironic, too knowing to appreciate Kiefer's straight-faced portentousness. However, our relationship to time has also changed. The epic address, laborious creative process and physical substance of Kiefer's work is tremendous. He is a written-in-stone part of art history - the kind of post-war German artist the world demanded - but he sadly seems condemned to continually perform being Anselm Kiefer. While his work rebuffs the contemporary world and its lighter-than-matter, thought-quick information revolution, it also lags behind. Mighty it may be, but his old-school monumentalism has nowhere to go.