Beschreibung:

Anselm Kiefer Für Paul Celan 2004 oil, emulsion, acrylic, charcoal, plaster, resin, branches on canvas 190 x 330 cm (74 3/4 x 129 7/8 in.)
Provenance Kunst and Kultur, Bonn Catalogue Essay Over the past thirty years Anselm Kiefer’s intensive and probing journey into the national and collective memory of post-war Germany has taken many forms. Of his immense oeuvre of sculpture, intimate works on paper and photography, Kiefer’s richly textured canvases stand apart as direct windows into the artist’s exploration of emotionally and politically charged historical narrative, physically confronting the viewer with their monumental scale. Born in post-World War II Germany in 1945, Anselm Kiefer is part of the generation of Neo- expressionist painters who sought to grapple with the physical and psychological devastation of war by embracing a primal relationship to the canvas in the tradition of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. He aims to rebuild rather than erase: reaping benefit from the past instead of losing it in oblivion. ‘In Germany, if something is finished, they like to flatten it, bring it down, make the grass grow over it. That's no good. You should keep these old buildings because they played a role and they can teach us something. I'm against the idea of bringing all these power stations down. I said, 'I'll take them all if you want'.’ (Kiefer, Alex Needham, The Guardian, December 2001) While Kiefer’s ideas have since expanded beyond the sole territory of Holocaust memory, he continues to use the canvas as a battleground for his exploration of myth and memory. His process echoes the same shamanistic tendency of his teacher Joseph Beuys an artist most known for his challenging installations and performances that attempted to reconcile personal trauma inflicted by war. Beuys’ performances, or ‘Actions,’ used the human body and physical environment to explore political and social messages, while his use of felt and fat acted as symbolic talismans. Similarly, Kiefer has built a personal rolodex of symbols to investigate these same issues. The materials he uses hold rich symbolism for the artist, but also reveal the emotional and structural influence of poetry on his artistic process. Kiefer has said that he ‘would like to be a poet, and use nothing but a pen.’ In Für Paul Celan Kiefer uses myth and symbol to construct a rich landscape in the manner reflective of that by which a poet composes a verse. He plays on the interaction between single elements, merging and layering them to form a new and capacious lot. Für Paul Celan is based on a variety of influences that particularly affected the artist in his creative thought. This particular lot, completed in 2004, is based on a series of photographs taken by the artist of fields outside of Salzburg after harvest time. One of the original photographs, overlaid with twigs and delicately inscribed by the artist’s hand, evokes the pseudoscientific and occult imagery of the divining rod, originally used to locate water, metals, or gemstones in 15th century Germany. The ‘diviner’ (rutengänger) is directly referenced in the title of the work, suggesting a metaphorical discovery of something precious in the desolate German landscape. The lines of the twigs draw us into this vast winter landscape, and into Kiefer’s exploration of collective memory and loss. Referring to the Salzburg photographs, Kiefer says, ‘And suddenly, these stumps made me think of runes. It was then that I remembered that Paul Celan had written a poem containing the words autumn’s runic weave. The result was an exhibition on Celan’ (Kiefer, in an interview by Horst Christoph and Nina Schedlmaer, Profil, 6 August 2005, pp. 109–10). Paul Celan himself, who was also heavily influenced by the repercussions of the Holocaust, shared Kiefer’s desire to transform fleeting memory into unbounded art-form. The poet stated: ‘Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence