Lot Essay
Anselm Kiefer creates images that are at once striking and profound. He draws his subject matter from myth, literature, history and religion: "Kiefer freely intermingles real and mythic times, spatial depictions, philosophical outlooks, and media in order to create grand, encompassing statements" (M. Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, Philadelphia 1987, p. 10). "I work with symbols which link our conciousness with the past. The symbols create a kind of simultaneous continuity and we recollect our origins" (ibid).
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, in southern Germany. After leaving the study of law in 1966, he turned to art and was particularly influenced by Joseph Beuys, who believed in the capacity of art to transform society. Kiefer chose narrative subject matter to convey his message. After 1980, materials and subject matter become intertwined--the use of straw, sand and mud in his depictions of the German landscape, for example--and lead to images that are at the same time sensually engaging and immediate.
Kiefer's interest in Jewish mysticism and the cabala began at the time of his first visit to Israel, in 1983. In Die Sefiroth, Kiefer explores this interest in spiritual order:
...the ten sefiroth, a heirarchical construct from Jewish mysticism that defines the divine being and the dissemination of His attributes...Each ranking presupposes a level closer to or farther from God...The sixteenth century Jewish mystic Issac Luria describes God's emanation [thusly]: the outpouring of his attributes, as given in the ten sefiroth, are revealed as divine lights flowing into a primeval space. As the lights rain down, humanity attempts to catch them in vessels and thereby gain the benefit of these divine characteristics; evil, however, is included amidst the good. The vessels are understood to be flawed, and in the end there are more lights than the bowls can hold. The vessels shatter, loosing good and evil on earth. With the breaking...there come still other worlds (ibid).
Thus in Die Sefiroth, Kiefer depicts the ten levels of divine emanations in the alchemical material of lead, suspended before the bridge that symbolizes the connection between the spiritual world and the real world. The dark waters and stormy skies forebode the outcome of their breaking upon the land, loosing not only the good but also the evil that seemed to have shaped so much of the modern history of his troubled, beloved country.
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, in southern Germany. After leaving the study of law in 1966, he turned to art and was particularly influenced by Joseph Beuys, who believed in the capacity of art to transform society. Kiefer chose narrative subject matter to convey his message. After 1980, materials and subject matter become intertwined--the use of straw, sand and mud in his depictions of the German landscape, for example--and lead to images that are at the same time sensually engaging and immediate.
Kiefer's interest in Jewish mysticism and the cabala began at the time of his first visit to Israel, in 1983. In Die Sefiroth, Kiefer explores this interest in spiritual order:
...the ten sefiroth, a heirarchical construct from Jewish mysticism that defines the divine being and the dissemination of His attributes...Each ranking presupposes a level closer to or farther from God...The sixteenth century Jewish mystic Issac Luria describes God's emanation [thusly]: the outpouring of his attributes, as given in the ten sefiroth, are revealed as divine lights flowing into a primeval space. As the lights rain down, humanity attempts to catch them in vessels and thereby gain the benefit of these divine characteristics; evil, however, is included amidst the good. The vessels are understood to be flawed, and in the end there are more lights than the bowls can hold. The vessels shatter, loosing good and evil on earth. With the breaking...there come still other worlds (ibid).
Thus in Die Sefiroth, Kiefer depicts the ten levels of divine emanations in the alchemical material of lead, suspended before the bridge that symbolizes the connection between the spiritual world and the real world. The dark waters and stormy skies forebode the outcome of their breaking upon the land, loosing not only the good but also the evil that seemed to have shaped so much of the modern history of his troubled, beloved country.