Anselm Kiefer

(German, born 1945)

Sefiroth
2002

Footnotes

Provenance
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Italy (acquired directly from the above in 2002)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Bear Witness, 10 March 2015, Lot 141
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
New York, Gagosian Gallery, Anselm Kiefer - Merkaba, 2002, p. 49, illustated in colour



Anselm Kiefer's work is a rare achievement in that it produces an immediate effect while leaving a lasting impression. Born into a landscape of rubble and irreconcilable guilt, Kiefer is part of the generation known as the Nachgeborenen, a term used for those in Germany born immediately after the war. Associated with the disparate Neo-Expressionist group, Kiefer's work was deemed controversial, signaling a return to Germany's embarrassing past, his figurative work out of place in an art world dominated by the post-painterly movement. However, it is Kiefer's bold vision that has arguably given expression to the spiritual plight of humanity in the twentieth century.

First exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in 2002, Sefiroth is part of a larger body of work dealing with Kabbalist literature and the after-life. A mystical school of thought within Judaism, Kabbalah is understood to be the Jewish response to historical trauma. Issuing from the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Kabbalah uses historical trauma and suffering as a vehicle for redemption through a mystical story of creation and destruction. In the present work, Kiefer combines Kabbalistic symbols with mystically suggestive imagery: at its centre the mystical tree of life, the Sefiroth, is imprinted on a snowy backdrop of a staircase, which rather than ascending to heaven appears to fall back to earth. Representing the ten emanations or illuminations of God's eternal light, the Sefiroth can be divided into three categories: conscious emotion, conscious intellect and the super-conscious or 'Kether' representing God at the top of the axis, which Kiefer has inscribed into the work. Through its soft palette of greys and whites, Sefiroth transmits a mesmerizing and enigmatic melancholy, which emanates the secret knowledge of Kabbalah, representing for the artist "a paradox of logic and mystical belief. It's part scholarship, part religion, part magic. For me, it is a spiritual journey anchored by images" (the artist in 'Heaven and Earth', Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2007, p. 339).

Kiefer's preoccupation with Judaism and more specifically with Kabbalah can be understood within his own wider aesthetic concerns with Germany's National Socialist history and the Holocaust. According to Lisa Saltzman, "it would seem that on a very basic level Kiefer's work suggests a memorializing impulse, an anamnetic impulse, an impulse to reintroduce, if not into the visual, at least into the linguistic and acoustic, landscape of postwar Germany, the absent other, the Jew, signified in the foreign sounds of the Hebrew language." (Lisa Salzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz, Cambridge 1999, p. 43). Through his use of Kabbalistic symbols of destruction and rebirth, Kiefer simultaneously addresses Germany's own preoccupation with the destruction of culture and specifically Jewish culture during the Holocaust. Through his work, Kiefer allowed for a dialogue to be opened regarding National Socialism simultaneous appropriation and destruction of German culture and identity. From Wagner and the Brothers Grimm to the Rhine and the German forest itself, National Socialism sought to adopt those signifiers of German culture as a means to embed and justify their racist and antisemitic world view.

Kiefer's work has the unique ability of creating a universal language that speaks directly to our shared humanity, it is through his extensive use of symbols that the artist is able to create both visual and metaphorical bridges between complicated and often problematic imagery, suggestive of our shared histories. Kiefer's work has been celebrated in numerous retrospectives at some of the world's leading institutions including Louisiana, Humlebæk, Royal Academy, London, Guggenheim, Bilbao and Centre Pompidou, Paris, with his work also found in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Albertina in Vienna among many others.