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Lot Essay
Towering above the viewer, Schlange (Snake) (2017) is a visionary work featuring one of Anselm Kiefer’s most important subjects. In a blaze of paint, shellac and gold leaf, flaming shards of colour erupt across the canvas, burning brightly against an ashen sky. At the centre, slithering over a metal grid, is a serpent. The snake is a central motif within Kiefer’s pantheon, which navigates a vast spectrum of history, mythology, literature and religion. A biblical symbol of evil, and of the fall of humankind, it has appeared throughout his art in numerous guises, invoking narratives drawn from Christian mythology, Norse legend and ancient Greek and Egyptian culture. Closely related to a series inspired by a glorious autumnal day in London’s Hyde Park, as well as the autumn poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, Schlange entwines the iconography of the Garden of Eden with themes of natural decay, destruction and rebirth. Its vision of burnished leaves evokes a fading paradise, consigned to the fires of hell. At the same time, it sings with the promise of renewal. It is a thrilling synthesis of material and symbolic associations, at once beautiful and demonic.
Kiefer was born in Germany at the close of the Second World War, and grew up in the rubble of its aftermath. His vast, encyclopaedic catalogue of references—from the poetry of Paul Celan, to the operas of Richard Wagner, to Nietzsche, the Bible and the Kabbalah—emerged as a means of confronting the atrocities of his country’s recent history. The Third Reich had perverted the teachings of science, art and literature to its own devastating ends. The serpent in the Garden of Eden, who tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thus became a powerful motif within Kiefer’s pictorial universe. It is explicitly identified as Satan in his seminal 1973 painting Quaternity (Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth), and appears as an omen of destruction in Ressurexit of the same year. In the 1983 painting Seraphim (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), meanwhile, the snake represents the fall of the rebel angels during the mythical War in Heaven. It is a symbol, notes Kiefer, ‘of both intelligence and its dangers’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in conversation with R. Calvocoressi, ‘Uraeus’, Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2018).
Elsewhere in his practice, however, Kiefer draws upon a host of other historical references. In his 2017 sculpture Uraeus, he invokes the snake’s associations with healing in ancient Greek legend. Other works, including Midgard (1982-1985, Milwaukee Art Museum), depict the great Norse sea serpent Jörmungandr: an ‘ouroboros’, or a snake eating its tail, which in many cultures symbolised the eternal cycle of time. In Schlange, Kiefer’s vivid image of autumnal splendour plays with some of these ideas. Throughout his practice, themes of devastation and destruction have gone hand in hand with the promise of regeneration, redemption and reconciliation. With autumn comes decay, but also the prospect of new life. These themes are embodied in Schlange’s material make-up: leaves become thick, fossilised strata of paint, which—in places—transform into fragments of real gold. For Kiefer, long fascinated by alchemical processes, the blazing spectacle becomes a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment. History and knowledge cycle round and round, by turns combusting, reforming and metamorphosing. The snake, at the centre of the storm, watches over all.
Kiefer was born in Germany at the close of the Second World War, and grew up in the rubble of its aftermath. His vast, encyclopaedic catalogue of references—from the poetry of Paul Celan, to the operas of Richard Wagner, to Nietzsche, the Bible and the Kabbalah—emerged as a means of confronting the atrocities of his country’s recent history. The Third Reich had perverted the teachings of science, art and literature to its own devastating ends. The serpent in the Garden of Eden, who tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thus became a powerful motif within Kiefer’s pictorial universe. It is explicitly identified as Satan in his seminal 1973 painting Quaternity (Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth), and appears as an omen of destruction in Ressurexit of the same year. In the 1983 painting Seraphim (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), meanwhile, the snake represents the fall of the rebel angels during the mythical War in Heaven. It is a symbol, notes Kiefer, ‘of both intelligence and its dangers’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in conversation with R. Calvocoressi, ‘Uraeus’, Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2018).
Elsewhere in his practice, however, Kiefer draws upon a host of other historical references. In his 2017 sculpture Uraeus, he invokes the snake’s associations with healing in ancient Greek legend. Other works, including Midgard (1982-1985, Milwaukee Art Museum), depict the great Norse sea serpent Jörmungandr: an ‘ouroboros’, or a snake eating its tail, which in many cultures symbolised the eternal cycle of time. In Schlange, Kiefer’s vivid image of autumnal splendour plays with some of these ideas. Throughout his practice, themes of devastation and destruction have gone hand in hand with the promise of regeneration, redemption and reconciliation. With autumn comes decay, but also the prospect of new life. These themes are embodied in Schlange’s material make-up: leaves become thick, fossilised strata of paint, which—in places—transform into fragments of real gold. For Kiefer, long fascinated by alchemical processes, the blazing spectacle becomes a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment. History and knowledge cycle round and round, by turns combusting, reforming and metamorphosing. The snake, at the centre of the storm, watches over all.