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Lot Essay
Spanning nearly three metres wide, Anselm Kiefer’s La Notte di Lia is a blazing, stellate nightscape. Executed in 2004, Kiefer’s monumental painting summons the Milky Way in frothy metallic waves that churn across a moonless night of saturnine greys. Illuminating a poetic interplay between earth and sky, the painting imagines the impenetrable, unknowable celestial sphere: a sublime, mysterious realm of immeasurable depths evincing all the potency of a collapsed star. Indeed, the fluctuating, mercurial surface of La Notte di Lia is at once ethereal and profane, a manmade object that reaches towards the celestial. Kiefer’s paint splattered vision of a star-studded sky and roiling surf extends beyond the horizon, and atop this ostensibly infinite expanse of flickering lightening and cresting galaxies, silvery filaments delineate a web of constellations; these ancient pinpricks narrate the stories of humanity, the burning, crucial legends that guide history and prophesise the future.
For the works of this period, Kiefer looked to the divine moment of creation as narrated in the Gnostic account of Isaak Luria, the 16th-century mystic and founder of modern Kabbalah, who described how God made the world by withdrawing into himself in order to create space for the universe. For Kiefer, creation was not a singular, definitive moment but rather an ongoing and cyclical process. In La Notte di Lia, this notion of an eternal recurrence is signalled by the sea, whose waves will crash ashore forevermore. Yet the artist’s understanding of the divine is also predicated on a relationship with the rational; Kiefer’s starry images are underpinned by a theory first proposed over three centuries earlier by the astrologist and alchemist Robert Fludd who believed in a duality between heaven and earth. For Fludd, the microcosm functions as a mirror to the macrocosm; that is, earthbound forms parallel the glimmering stars overhead—‘as above so below’. Seeking to visualise this marriage of divine and rational forces, Kiefer’s paintings ‘do not exalt a solitary mystical delirium, but instead record an experience of the cosmos and form a mirror or memory for those who look at them’ (D. Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, p. 265). Indeed, La Notte di Lia looks to the constellations for communion and as an image of a collective conscious and a cosmic experience.
The ancient narratives that shape society have long been central to Kiefer. Born at the end of the Second World War, for decades his practice engaged with symbols central to the German psyche that had bbeen contaminated by Nazism. Over time, he broadened his outlook, invoking in his paintings and sculptures Isis and Osiris, Cabbala, the ancient Greeks and the Bible, among others, in order to reconcile with the now. As the curator Kathleen Soriano noted, ‘Kiefer’s art is concerned with a handful of issues, themes, stories that he is constantly revisiting; at the heart of it are ideas about cosmology, the connection between heaven and earth’ (K. Soriano quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Anselm’s Alchemy’, RA Magazine, Autumn 2014, n. p.). These stories, for the artist, are a reincarnating force, and La Notte di Lia envisions the world in the earliest days of creation, but in the glimmering vision is a warning of the dangers that bolster any belief system: ‘Heaven is an idea,’ he has remarked, ‘a piece of ancient internal knowledge. It is not a physical construction’ (A. Kiefer, interview with M. Auping, 2004 reprinted in Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat., Fort Worth Museum of Art, Fort Worth, 2005, p. 168).
For the works of this period, Kiefer looked to the divine moment of creation as narrated in the Gnostic account of Isaak Luria, the 16th-century mystic and founder of modern Kabbalah, who described how God made the world by withdrawing into himself in order to create space for the universe. For Kiefer, creation was not a singular, definitive moment but rather an ongoing and cyclical process. In La Notte di Lia, this notion of an eternal recurrence is signalled by the sea, whose waves will crash ashore forevermore. Yet the artist’s understanding of the divine is also predicated on a relationship with the rational; Kiefer’s starry images are underpinned by a theory first proposed over three centuries earlier by the astrologist and alchemist Robert Fludd who believed in a duality between heaven and earth. For Fludd, the microcosm functions as a mirror to the macrocosm; that is, earthbound forms parallel the glimmering stars overhead—‘as above so below’. Seeking to visualise this marriage of divine and rational forces, Kiefer’s paintings ‘do not exalt a solitary mystical delirium, but instead record an experience of the cosmos and form a mirror or memory for those who look at them’ (D. Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, p. 265). Indeed, La Notte di Lia looks to the constellations for communion and as an image of a collective conscious and a cosmic experience.
The ancient narratives that shape society have long been central to Kiefer. Born at the end of the Second World War, for decades his practice engaged with symbols central to the German psyche that had bbeen contaminated by Nazism. Over time, he broadened his outlook, invoking in his paintings and sculptures Isis and Osiris, Cabbala, the ancient Greeks and the Bible, among others, in order to reconcile with the now. As the curator Kathleen Soriano noted, ‘Kiefer’s art is concerned with a handful of issues, themes, stories that he is constantly revisiting; at the heart of it are ideas about cosmology, the connection between heaven and earth’ (K. Soriano quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Anselm’s Alchemy’, RA Magazine, Autumn 2014, n. p.). These stories, for the artist, are a reincarnating force, and La Notte di Lia envisions the world in the earliest days of creation, but in the glimmering vision is a warning of the dangers that bolster any belief system: ‘Heaven is an idea,’ he has remarked, ‘a piece of ancient internal knowledge. It is not a physical construction’ (A. Kiefer, interview with M. Auping, 2004 reprinted in Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat., Fort Worth Museum of Art, Fort Worth, 2005, p. 168).