Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love)

Monochrome waves crash over a monochrome shore in Anselm Kiefer’s Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love). Executed in 2011 and spanning well over three metres wide, the panoramic seascape is a monumental testament to the literary references that ebb and flow through the artist’s practice. Its title is taken from a nineteenth-century play by Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer, which re-tells the classical myth of Hero, a Greek priestess, and Leander, her lover, who drowned while swimming the Hellespont to be with her. Inspiring writers and artists for centuries, from Marlowe and Keats to Rubens, Turner and Twombly, the ancient tragedy has accrued rich layers of meaning, and is something of a palimpsest. Here, Kiefer subjects his photographic print to its own natural processes of transformation. Its expansive surface—mottled and fantastically patinated by electrolysis—is superimposed with mixed media and an obstetric instrument. The vast seascape is at once treacherous and benign, as Kiefer weaves conflicting themes of sterility and fertility, loss and birth, the austere and the sublime. The story holds personal significance for the artist, who, growing up on the banks of the Rhine near France’s border, was deeply marked by its seasonal flooding. Here, capturing the sublime meeting of land and sea, he considers nature’s constantly shifting boundaries.