Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT EUROPEAN COLLECTION
Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945)

Cosmos and Demian

Details
Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945)
Cosmos and Demian
titled 'COSMOS Demian' (along the upper edge)
acrylic, clay, resin, gouache and photographic paper on cardboard
29 ½ x 39 3/8in. (75 x 100cm.)
Executed in 2005
Provenance
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg.
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2006).
Anon. sale, Sotheby's New York, 10 November 2011, lot 550.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
Literature
Anselm Kiefer: I Sette Palazzi Celesti, exh. cat., Milan, Hangar Bicocca, 2004 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU for sale using a Temporary Import regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the Hammer price. VAT is also payable (at 20%) on the buyer’s Premium on a VAT inclusive basis. When a buyer of such a lot has registered an EU address but wishes to export the lot or complete the import into another EU country, he must advise Christie's immediately after the auction.

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Rachel Boddington
Rachel Boddington

Lot Essay

Each of these buildings has a history created by its own fiction and need to demonstrate its philosophy of existence. That fiction is part of the debris of history. My images connect with that debris. They attempt to connect with the beginning or the end, with a deep and lost memory between here and there’
(exh. cat., Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, 2005, p. 41).

‘We can be reaching for the sky or we can find ourselves under surveillance from above’ (N. Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer: Aperiatur Terra, exh. cat., White Cube, 2007, p.73)

In Cosmos and Demian, 2005, Anselm Kiefer confronts notions of permanence, ruin, celebration and destruction by ‘carving’ out the image of two monumental decaying monoliths using extraordinary earthly materials. Oil, emulsion, shellac, clay, flowers and lead are used to depict two derelict buildings which resemble bombed out ruins. The crumbling, cracked concrete of the towering architecture is set into a surface of decaying, muddy earth. The two towers belong to a series of works executed by Kiefer consisting of numerous large-scale tower installations, one of which consisted of two colossal towers entitled Jericho, installed as part of the artist’s retrospective in the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2006. For Kiefer, the towers represent ‘the ultimate source of the flow of the purest divine light’ that enables us to live both in the heavens and the earth. As Norman Rosenthal suggested, ‘We can be reaching for the sky or we can find ourselves under surveillance from above’ (N. Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer: Aperiatur Terra, exh. cat., White Cube, 2007, p.73). These towers are not only in one sense symbols of connection between land and sky but also of man’s spiritual aspirations and the potential tragedy of them being taken away. Kiefer’s concept consciously mirrors the biblical Tower of Babel and the legend’s account of the tensions, conflict and fragilities of man’s quest for enlightenment.

Cosmos and Demian is titled in reference to two Third Century physicians who refused to recant their faith and were martyred and later canonised as saints. Converting many to Christianity throughout their charitable medical work, the two saints are often depicted as twins. A rare elaboration of the legend of the two saints was realized by Fra Angelico as an altarpiece during the 15th Century. The Healing of Palladia by St Cosmas and St Damian, 1437-40 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), depicts the saints offering care to Palladia, referencing the human condition in desire for transcendence. The symbolic disparity which the two saints represent is the disconnection in the aspiration for a spiritual existence with the final misfortune which followed. Kiefer uses the saints as paradigms to configure both the immense hope and futility of the rising towers.

Kiefer believes fervently that artists are able to invest their materials with meaning, transcending their physicality. The various media he uses are chosen with deliberate thought to their symbolic potential. He has spoken recently of the richness of a painting, as opposed to the photograph. ‘A photograph is only the instant the shutter was open, while a painting doesn’t only show a moment; it presents a history. It’s a living thing. It changes, it has depth’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in M. Gayford, ‘I like vanished things: Anselm Kiefer on art, alchemy and his childhood’, The Spectator, 20 September 2014). As if to emphasise this enigmatic quality, his paintings have deeply textured surfaces that combine a thick layer of paint with a thin veil of gouache, acrylic and resin, as well as clay and cardboard, as in this present work. It is this paradoxical fusion of earth-coloured, weighty, rough materials with the symbols of ascent which lends Cosmos and Demian its gravitas, and has earned Kiefer international recognition as an artist who is unafraid of infusing visually powerful work with the promise of intellectual enlightenment.

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