(born in Donaueschingen in 1945)
Das Floß der Medusa, 2003, titled, gouache, watercolour, charcoal, photograph, collage on photopaper, 94.5 x 99.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection of the artist, Barjac
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg
acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007 Private Collection, Austria

Exhibited:
Hamburg, Seestücke. Von Max Beckmann bis Gerhard Richter.
Hamburger Kunsthalle, 8 June – 16 September 2007 exh.cat. p. 125, n°86 with ill.

Anselm Kiefer’s historic, mythological landscapes deal with the iconography of the past and the reappearance of the repressed in an ambivalent way. Kiefer is one of the most well-known and successful post-war German artists on the international stage, and is considered to have revived history painting.

The Holocaust is repeatedly the topic of his powerful, monumental works, which ask questions of the ideological origins of National Socialism and the role of German national myths in laying the groundwork for this. While his early period of work is characterized by a near-obsessive interaction with German history and culture, from the 1980s onwards he added Egyptian and Ancient Eastern mythologies and cosmogonies, along with Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) as new sources of inspiration.

Kiefer’s characteristic manner of creating images, including a range of sources and making use of them in a way that is just as playful as it is mysterious, is also a defining feature of his 2003 work Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of the Medusa). The theme has been interpreted numerous times in art, literature and aesthetics, but one of the most well-known is Géricault’s 1818 work, which depicts the historical catastrophe as the physical embodiment of despair: the raft emerges from the stormy sea in an abrupt close-up, with the pale bodies of the victims of the shipwreck frantically intertwined with each other.

This contrasts with Kiefer’s depiction of a calm, empty sea which, despite this, appears no less ghostly and hopeless. Instead of a cloud there is a heavy concrete mass hanging in the air. Combined with the hand-written title underneath it, this evokes notions of bleak premonitions and catastrophes. The two collages of photos are covered with blue/grey shades, bathing the dystopian landscape in an ice-cold light.

“I see my images like ruins, or building blocks, that you can put together. They are materials you can use to build something with, rather than something that’s complete. They’re closer to nothingness than completion.”
Anselm Kiefer, “Ich wollte noch einmal neu anfangen“, in: art –
Das Kunstmagazin, 7/2001 via archive.is.

Provenance:
Collection of the artist, Barjac
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg
acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007 Private Collection, Austria

Exhibited:
Hamburger Kunsthalle, 8 June – 16 September 2007 exh.cat. p. 125, n°86 with ill.

Anselm Kiefer’s historic, mythological landscapes deal with the iconography of the past and the reappearance of the repressed in an ambivalent way. Kiefer is one of the most well-known and successful post-war German artists on the international stage, and is considered to have revived history painting.

The Holocaust is repeatedly the topic of his powerful, monumental works, which ask questions of the ideological origins of National Socialism and the role of German national myths in laying the groundwork for this. While his early period of work is characterized by a near-obsessive interaction with German history and culture, from the 1980s onwards he added Egyptian and Ancient Eastern mythologies and cosmogonies, along with Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) as new sources of inspiration.

Kiefer’s characteristic manner of creating images, including a range of sources and making use of them in a way that is just as playful as it is mysterious, is also a defining feature of his 2003 work Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of the Medusa). The theme has been interpreted numerous times in art, literature and aesthetics, but one of the most well-known is Géricault’s 1818 work, which depicts the historical catastrophe as the physical embodiment of despair: the raft emerges from the stormy sea in an abrupt close-up, with the pale bodies of the victims of the shipwreck frantically intertwined with each other.

This contrasts with Kiefer’s depiction of a calm, empty sea which, despite this, appears no less ghostly and hopeless. Instead of a cloud there is a heavy concrete mass hanging in the air. Combined with the hand-written title underneath it, this evokes notions of bleak premonitions and catastrophes. The two collages of photos are covered with blue/grey shades, bathing the dystopian landscape in an ice-cold light.

“I see my images like ruins, or building blocks, that you can put together. They are materials you can use to build something with, rather than something that’s complete. They’re closer to nothingness than completion.”
Anselm Kiefer, “Ich wollte noch einmal neu anfangen“, in: art –
Das Kunstmagazin, 7/2001 via archive.is.