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Lot Essay
Executed in 1996, Untitled is one of an important series of sunflower paintings created by Anselm Kiefer in the mid-1990s, other examples of which are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Seattle Art Museum. This work presents a supine figure lying in a field of giant sunflowers while one solitary flower sprouts from his abdomen. Like much of his oeuvre, in Untitled Kiefer weaves several layers of art historical, mystical and philosophical ideas into a powerful and mysterious image.
Lying on his back with his arms akimbo, the naked male figure in Untitled is in the yoga position shavasana, an expression of a dream-like state, halfway between sleep and death. While not strictly a self-portrait, this figure is a self-representation of Kiefer, depicting the artist in the role of the everyman. Reclining among a dense forest of colossal sunflowers, a single plant emerges from the figure's core, recalling a fourteenth-century image from the Ashburn Manuscript in the Laurentian Library, Florence in which Adam, having been pierced by Mercurius's arrow, lies inert, with a tree rising from his loins. The iconography of a tree shooting from the human form can also be traced back to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painted books from Mesoamerica, where it was held that a family dynasty originated as if it were born from a tree.
Kiefer introduced the sunflower into his work as a potent symbol of the passage of time and the link between heaven and earth. The artist first encountered the subject in 1963 while travelling through the south of France where he came across the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. Untitled was created while Kiefer was living in Barjac, Provence, not far from Arles where van Gogh had produced his vibrant yellow sunflowers. In stark contrast to those painted by van Gogh, Kiefer's sunflowers are oxymorons. Rather than reflect the vivid hues of the sun, the artist's flowers are dark and menacing, silhouetted in black against a pale sky. For Kiefer, the sunflower is a mystical plant that links the realms of heaven and earth, much in the same way as Jacob's Ladder or the Sefirotic Tree of the Kabbalah which feature in his other works. The sunflower stretches upwards, its head inclined towards the sun until fully ripe when, loaded with seeds, it turns down again towards the earth to shower its seeds upon it.
With its dome-like head full of seeds ready to produce new life, Kiefer's sunflower is a living embodiment of the prospect of metamorphosis and regeneration. In depicting an enormous sunflower growing from a figure's viscera, Untitled illustrates a cycle of struggle, transformation and ultimately hope in the possibility of spiritual transcendence and rebirth after death.
Lying on his back with his arms akimbo, the naked male figure in Untitled is in the yoga position shavasana, an expression of a dream-like state, halfway between sleep and death. While not strictly a self-portrait, this figure is a self-representation of Kiefer, depicting the artist in the role of the everyman. Reclining among a dense forest of colossal sunflowers, a single plant emerges from the figure's core, recalling a fourteenth-century image from the Ashburn Manuscript in the Laurentian Library, Florence in which Adam, having been pierced by Mercurius's arrow, lies inert, with a tree rising from his loins. The iconography of a tree shooting from the human form can also be traced back to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painted books from Mesoamerica, where it was held that a family dynasty originated as if it were born from a tree.
Kiefer introduced the sunflower into his work as a potent symbol of the passage of time and the link between heaven and earth. The artist first encountered the subject in 1963 while travelling through the south of France where he came across the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. Untitled was created while Kiefer was living in Barjac, Provence, not far from Arles where van Gogh had produced his vibrant yellow sunflowers. In stark contrast to those painted by van Gogh, Kiefer's sunflowers are oxymorons. Rather than reflect the vivid hues of the sun, the artist's flowers are dark and menacing, silhouetted in black against a pale sky. For Kiefer, the sunflower is a mystical plant that links the realms of heaven and earth, much in the same way as Jacob's Ladder or the Sefirotic Tree of the Kabbalah which feature in his other works. The sunflower stretches upwards, its head inclined towards the sun until fully ripe when, loaded with seeds, it turns down again towards the earth to shower its seeds upon it.
With its dome-like head full of seeds ready to produce new life, Kiefer's sunflower is a living embodiment of the prospect of metamorphosis and regeneration. In depicting an enormous sunflower growing from a figure's viscera, Untitled illustrates a cycle of struggle, transformation and ultimately hope in the possibility of spiritual transcendence and rebirth after death.