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Lot Essay
Held in the Rokkedal Collection, Denmark, since 1999, Orianda is a visionary, expressive painting by Anselm Kiefer. From an oxidised, textured surface an enigmatic architectural structure emerges: in front of this otherworldly fortress, a gnarled web of plant matter spreads over the coarse ground. Created in 1985, Orianda forms part of Kiefer’s prolonged engagement with German history. The work’s title refers to a semi-urban settlement in the Crimea where, in 1838, the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel was commissioned to design a country retreat for Alexandra Feodorovna, the wife of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. Schinkel sketched his plans for a grand palace to be situated on a precipice overlooking the Black Sea. The project was never realised, but the surviving drawings speak to its neoclassical splendour, echoed in the ghostly building depicted in Orianda. The work stems from an important decade for Kiefer, who represented Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale; in 1984, just before he painted Orianda, he mounted a large solo touring exhibition that travelled to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
The faded grandeur of Germany’s past has long been central to Kiefer’s practice, and figures such as Schinkel and Caspar David Friedrich loom large over his art. In contemporaneous mixed-media paintings such as Das Museum (1984-1992), held in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the legacies of this past are likewise manifested as an architectural inheritance. The spectres of history haunt the land both psychically and spiritually. As art historian Mark Rosenthal notes, ‘Melancholy and elegy are Kiefer’s principal leitmotifs and inform an understanding of his work. But Kiefer’s examination of grieving is oblique; he seeks metaphors for his profound sense of loss and for the ways this emotion is enacted. In particular, architectural monuments play a powerful role in his pictorial world’ (M. Rosenthal, ‘Stone Halls 1983’, in Anselm Kiefer: The Seven Heavenly Palaces 1973-2001, exh. cat. Fondation Beyeler, Basel 2002, p. 51). Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, Orianda is a material testament to the complexities of history, myth and the inexorable passage of time.
The faded grandeur of Germany’s past has long been central to Kiefer’s practice, and figures such as Schinkel and Caspar David Friedrich loom large over his art. In contemporaneous mixed-media paintings such as Das Museum (1984-1992), held in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the legacies of this past are likewise manifested as an architectural inheritance. The spectres of history haunt the land both psychically and spiritually. As art historian Mark Rosenthal notes, ‘Melancholy and elegy are Kiefer’s principal leitmotifs and inform an understanding of his work. But Kiefer’s examination of grieving is oblique; he seeks metaphors for his profound sense of loss and for the ways this emotion is enacted. In particular, architectural monuments play a powerful role in his pictorial world’ (M. Rosenthal, ‘Stone Halls 1983’, in Anselm Kiefer: The Seven Heavenly Palaces 1973-2001, exh. cat. Fondation Beyeler, Basel 2002, p. 51). Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, Orianda is a material testament to the complexities of history, myth and the inexorable passage of time.