.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘Heaven is an idea … a piece of ancient internal knowledge. It is not a physical construction’
(A. Kiefer, interviewed by M. Auping in Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, 2005, p. 168).
Vast and dazzling in both surface and scale, Anselm Kiefer’s The Secret Life of Plants: Star Painting, 2003, is a poetic invocation of the cosmos as a mystical arena of the human mind. Kiefer’s shimmering paint-splattered lead panel becomes a sparkling vision of a star-studded universe, with white plaster-coated branches conjuring a glittering web of constellations. Taking its title from Peter Tompkins’ and Christopher Bird’s 1973 treatise The Secret Life of Plants, the present work is part of one of the most important and major series painted by Kiefer in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Central to both the 1973 book and Kiefer’s subsequent paintings is an idea first postulated by Robert Fludd in the seventeenth century: that every plant on the earth has its equivalent star in heaven.
A philosopher, alchemist and Rosicrucian, Fludd founded his proposition on the basic hermetic principle that the microcosm is a mirror of the macrocosm. Tompkins and Bird revived Fludd’s notion in their twentieth-century investigation into the sentient nature of plants, arguing that, because their cells are connected and responsive to the cosmos, plants are able to reveal the mysteries of the universe in ways more profound than empirical research. In The Secret Life of Plants: Star Painting, Kiefer engages the same dichotomy between scientific rationality and the mystical properties of nature, introducing organic plant matter to an earthbound, elemental base of lead. Arranging the white branches into three interconnected constellations, Lynx, Ursa Major and Leo Minor, Kiefer offers direct parallels between stellar formation and the natural growth patterns of plants on the earth. Evoking bright streaks of lightening against the night sky, these irregular linear forms are contrasted with the strict empiricism of ruled lines, as well as NASA’s system of numbering the stars. Exuding a lyrical sense of interplay between earth and sky, between human invention and nature, the work also functions as a manmade imagining of the vast and impenetrable space that we can never fully comprehend, a mental projection of an unknowable realm.
Much of Kiefer’s art since the 1980s has explored the notion that heaven and earth are reflective of one other. The sunflower, with its black dome-like head full of individual seeds, was a particular source of fascination for Kiefer in the 1990s – a living embodiment of Fludd’s arresting parallel between flowers and stars. In the present work, the relationship between the manmade and spiritual is further embodied in Kiefer’s choice of materials – in particular, his use of lead as a pictorial ground. ‘Lead affects me more than all other metals’, Kiefer claims. ‘In alchemy, this metal stood on the lowest rung of the process of extracting gold. On the one hand, lead was bluntly heavy and connected to Saturn, the hideous man – on the other hand it contains silver and was also already the proof of other spiritual levels’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in G. Celant, Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2007, p. 183).
(A. Kiefer, interviewed by M. Auping in Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, 2005, p. 168).
Vast and dazzling in both surface and scale, Anselm Kiefer’s The Secret Life of Plants: Star Painting, 2003, is a poetic invocation of the cosmos as a mystical arena of the human mind. Kiefer’s shimmering paint-splattered lead panel becomes a sparkling vision of a star-studded universe, with white plaster-coated branches conjuring a glittering web of constellations. Taking its title from Peter Tompkins’ and Christopher Bird’s 1973 treatise The Secret Life of Plants, the present work is part of one of the most important and major series painted by Kiefer in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Central to both the 1973 book and Kiefer’s subsequent paintings is an idea first postulated by Robert Fludd in the seventeenth century: that every plant on the earth has its equivalent star in heaven.
A philosopher, alchemist and Rosicrucian, Fludd founded his proposition on the basic hermetic principle that the microcosm is a mirror of the macrocosm. Tompkins and Bird revived Fludd’s notion in their twentieth-century investigation into the sentient nature of plants, arguing that, because their cells are connected and responsive to the cosmos, plants are able to reveal the mysteries of the universe in ways more profound than empirical research. In The Secret Life of Plants: Star Painting, Kiefer engages the same dichotomy between scientific rationality and the mystical properties of nature, introducing organic plant matter to an earthbound, elemental base of lead. Arranging the white branches into three interconnected constellations, Lynx, Ursa Major and Leo Minor, Kiefer offers direct parallels between stellar formation and the natural growth patterns of plants on the earth. Evoking bright streaks of lightening against the night sky, these irregular linear forms are contrasted with the strict empiricism of ruled lines, as well as NASA’s system of numbering the stars. Exuding a lyrical sense of interplay between earth and sky, between human invention and nature, the work also functions as a manmade imagining of the vast and impenetrable space that we can never fully comprehend, a mental projection of an unknowable realm.
Much of Kiefer’s art since the 1980s has explored the notion that heaven and earth are reflective of one other. The sunflower, with its black dome-like head full of individual seeds, was a particular source of fascination for Kiefer in the 1990s – a living embodiment of Fludd’s arresting parallel between flowers and stars. In the present work, the relationship between the manmade and spiritual is further embodied in Kiefer’s choice of materials – in particular, his use of lead as a pictorial ground. ‘Lead affects me more than all other metals’, Kiefer claims. ‘In alchemy, this metal stood on the lowest rung of the process of extracting gold. On the one hand, lead was bluntly heavy and connected to Saturn, the hideous man – on the other hand it contains silver and was also already the proof of other spiritual levels’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in G. Celant, Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2007, p. 183).