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Lot Essay
Anselm Kiefer’s Rapunzel (2006) is a mythopoetic exploration of cultural memory and the ruin of time, combining unorthodox materials to produce a visceral, tactile interpretation of its folkloric subject matter. Taking the story we know today from Grimm’s Tales, in which the maiden Rapunzel is imprisoned in a tower, letting her hair down to allow her lover to see her, Kiefer presents us with a very literal rendering: a tower rises above the painting’s field, from which real human hair hangs tantalisingly down – an ambivalent, open-ended version of the story that grapples with profound questions of spirituality and death.
Here, Kiefer takes a photograph of one of his signature towers and slathers it in paint, as if consuming it in apocalyptic waves, before appending the lock of hair that floats down from its top, drawing the eye to the texturally rich foreground of cracked, dried clay. In one sense, the scene is apocalyptic, the story seeming to decay as Kiefer retells it: Rapunzel’s tower is transformed into an image, a mere photographic memory, that seems liable to collapse or be erased at any moment; the hair is transformed from the fantastical instrument of freedom and love that it is in the folktale to a melancholic residue of human presence. Yet equally we might read into the picture a more redemptive narrative, whereby the tower is transformed from Rapunzel’s elevated prison to a higher, more ethereal plane, her hair transporting us from the arid materiality of the poem’s foreground to something less brutally real, and a little more heavenly. Kiefer balances these two competing visions, constructing his own version of the story that seems to draw on contemporary history while maintaining the mystery, ambiguity and ancient power that lies within myth.
The tower itself – a teetering edifice of corrugated grey panels that balance precariously on one another – is an iconic motif of Kiefer’s, heavy with the symbolic power of past literary, historical and mythological structures while possessing their own powerfully new strangeness. After unveiling his first gigantic towers at an installation in Milan in 2004, Kiefer continued to install them at a number of locations the world, though most impressively of all, at his vast, otherworldly estate in Barjac, France, where, despite the artist having left the site in 2014, immense constructions remain today in eerie isolation, slowly being reclaimed by nature.
Here, Kiefer takes a photograph of one of his signature towers and slathers it in paint, as if consuming it in apocalyptic waves, before appending the lock of hair that floats down from its top, drawing the eye to the texturally rich foreground of cracked, dried clay. In one sense, the scene is apocalyptic, the story seeming to decay as Kiefer retells it: Rapunzel’s tower is transformed into an image, a mere photographic memory, that seems liable to collapse or be erased at any moment; the hair is transformed from the fantastical instrument of freedom and love that it is in the folktale to a melancholic residue of human presence. Yet equally we might read into the picture a more redemptive narrative, whereby the tower is transformed from Rapunzel’s elevated prison to a higher, more ethereal plane, her hair transporting us from the arid materiality of the poem’s foreground to something less brutally real, and a little more heavenly. Kiefer balances these two competing visions, constructing his own version of the story that seems to draw on contemporary history while maintaining the mystery, ambiguity and ancient power that lies within myth.
The tower itself – a teetering edifice of corrugated grey panels that balance precariously on one another – is an iconic motif of Kiefer’s, heavy with the symbolic power of past literary, historical and mythological structures while possessing their own powerfully new strangeness. After unveiling his first gigantic towers at an installation in Milan in 2004, Kiefer continued to install them at a number of locations the world, though most impressively of all, at his vast, otherworldly estate in Barjac, France, where, despite the artist having left the site in 2014, immense constructions remain today in eerie isolation, slowly being reclaimed by nature.