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Lot Essay
‘I see all the layers. In my paintings, I tell stories in order to show what lies behind history. I make a hole and pass through.’
—ANSELM KIEFER
A windswept tableau in roiling whites and greys that lies somewhere between landscape, abstraction and sculpture, Anselm Kiefer’s Das Salz der Erde (The Salt of the Earth) (2011) is a work rich with both esoteric symbolism and primal power. First, smothering his original photograph with a coating of white paint, Kiefer builds up an indistinct landscape suffused with epic power and natural majesty, as suggestions of waves and sea-spray seem to mutate into mountains and snowstorms in the viewer’s eye. Against this backdrop, Kiefer hangs a set of scales, seemingly fashioned from scrap metal, on which rest two piles of crystalline salt, and painted fragments of gleaming, sulphurous yellow – a hauntingly powerful icon that emerges from the landscape into the space of the room itself. The work pulsates with religious undertones, not only from Kiefer’s own Catholic upbringing, but also his interests in other ancient belief systems and mythologies; while its title references Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 3:18, the scales at the work’s centre speak to the Ancient Egyptian belief in the weighing of man’s soul in his passage to the afterlife. The work’s own materiality seems to spring forth from these compacted religious symbols and metaphors, just as the soul takes on a physical quality in Jesus’ words or in the Egyptian myth of the afterlife, the scales infused with a magical quality of transubstantiation somewhere between ancient enchantment and sublime religious experience.
Relatedly, the scales also reflect Kiefer’s long-held interest in alchemy, the three points of the scales marked by the chemical symbols for sulphur (S), mercury (Hg) and salt (sodium chloride – NaCl), or the three primes of alchemical theory. For Kiefer, the system of alchemy becomes a way of communicating his struggle to achieve a regenerated art in the wake of twentieth century history – in a sense, using alchemy to weigh his own soul within his art. Germano Celant identifies this as Kiefer’s quest to become ‘a blank “surface”, freed from the drama of a historic, tragic and negative script’ by a kind of alchemical process of spiritual refinement and rebirth ‘created by the encounter between the static and corporeal white mass (salt), the burning spirit (sulphur) and the soul (the psyche of Antiquity), which is radiant and in movement (mercury)’ (G. Celant, Anselm Kiefer: Salt of the Earth, exh. cat., Fondazione Vedova, Venice, 2011, pp. 16-17). Das Salz der Erde performs this process itself, effervescing with a transformative alchemical energy that distils its elemental materials into a miraculous new form.
—ANSELM KIEFER
A windswept tableau in roiling whites and greys that lies somewhere between landscape, abstraction and sculpture, Anselm Kiefer’s Das Salz der Erde (The Salt of the Earth) (2011) is a work rich with both esoteric symbolism and primal power. First, smothering his original photograph with a coating of white paint, Kiefer builds up an indistinct landscape suffused with epic power and natural majesty, as suggestions of waves and sea-spray seem to mutate into mountains and snowstorms in the viewer’s eye. Against this backdrop, Kiefer hangs a set of scales, seemingly fashioned from scrap metal, on which rest two piles of crystalline salt, and painted fragments of gleaming, sulphurous yellow – a hauntingly powerful icon that emerges from the landscape into the space of the room itself. The work pulsates with religious undertones, not only from Kiefer’s own Catholic upbringing, but also his interests in other ancient belief systems and mythologies; while its title references Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 3:18, the scales at the work’s centre speak to the Ancient Egyptian belief in the weighing of man’s soul in his passage to the afterlife. The work’s own materiality seems to spring forth from these compacted religious symbols and metaphors, just as the soul takes on a physical quality in Jesus’ words or in the Egyptian myth of the afterlife, the scales infused with a magical quality of transubstantiation somewhere between ancient enchantment and sublime religious experience.
Relatedly, the scales also reflect Kiefer’s long-held interest in alchemy, the three points of the scales marked by the chemical symbols for sulphur (S), mercury (Hg) and salt (sodium chloride – NaCl), or the three primes of alchemical theory. For Kiefer, the system of alchemy becomes a way of communicating his struggle to achieve a regenerated art in the wake of twentieth century history – in a sense, using alchemy to weigh his own soul within his art. Germano Celant identifies this as Kiefer’s quest to become ‘a blank “surface”, freed from the drama of a historic, tragic and negative script’ by a kind of alchemical process of spiritual refinement and rebirth ‘created by the encounter between the static and corporeal white mass (salt), the burning spirit (sulphur) and the soul (the psyche of Antiquity), which is radiant and in movement (mercury)’ (G. Celant, Anselm Kiefer: Salt of the Earth, exh. cat., Fondazione Vedova, Venice, 2011, pp. 16-17). Das Salz der Erde performs this process itself, effervescing with a transformative alchemical energy that distils its elemental materials into a miraculous new form.