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By Gérard A. Goodrow
Sunflowers fill Kiefer's pictures since his return to painting in 1995but sunflowers with a difference.
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Since turning his back on Germany in 1992 to settle in the southern French town of Barjac, Anselm Kiefer has expanded his palette of iconography beyond recent German history and Teutonic legends, becoming more universal in his choice of themes and motifs. From 1992 to 1995 the artist took a three-year break from painting and traveled extensively, especially in Israel, Egypt, China and Mexico. Critics and historians often see this period as a kind of identity crisis, triggered perhaps by his divorce and the failure of his planned foundation in Odenwald, where he had lived and worked.
Asked about his new themes and why he has abandoned his previous obsession with German history, he replies: 'My themes have not changed at all; I see this differently. They have become expanded. Earlier, I was interested in what was close to me, and that was recent German history. This became more enriched over time; but no one wants to stay on the same path forever. I never wanted to become a Holocaust specialist.'
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Dried sunflowers with their heads pointing downward as though in mourning have become a central motif in Kiefer's works since he began painting again in 1995. The earliest titles of these pictures underscore this melancholic theme. In Aschenblume (Flower of Ashes) he depicts himself lying down beneath a monumental sunflower. In the present work, Die klugen Jungfrauen (The Wise Virgins), the sunflowers are blacked out and loom ominously over a diminutive, standing self-portrait. The wilted sunflowers stand in great lines above the scorched earth with heavy heads titled towards the ground. The sunflowers have lost their petals, their leaves and their colorthey appear simultaneously to be dead and to be in mourning. It is this image of wilting in the ground, head bowed towards scorched earth not fertile soil, that makes the image so haunting.
The fields of flowers in Kiefer's works since the mid 1990s are often associated with his fascination with the 17th-century British Rosicrucian, Robert Fludd, whose ideas connected the microcosm and the macrocosm, and who said: 'Every plant has his related star in the sky.' But Kiefer's sojourn in China also reminded him of Chairman Mao's infamous call to the people during the savage Cultural Revolution: 'Let 1,000 flowers bloom'. Kiefer's flowers no longer bloomtheir state of decline clearly symbolizes the futility of revolutions as well as any political appropriation of culture.
Gérard A. Goodrow is Director and Co-Head of the Post War & Contemporary Art Department, Christie's London.
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