Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday)

Extending nearly three metres in height, Anselm Kiefer’s enthralling Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday) seems to have been born from a stellar flare. Across the large canvas, nebulas of soft peach and white blaze and crackle. Resting atop this celestial expanse lies a single palm leaf, whose long stem curves gracefully over the spattered and tactile ground. Created in 2006, Palmsonntag forms part of Kiefer’s prolonged engagement with Christian iconography; the painting’s title, scrawled here in delicate white cursive, commemorates Palm Sunday, the Christian celebration marking Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and the first day of Holy Week. Although raised as a Catholic, Kiefer later renounced his faith, turning instead to a wider range of religious tropes as a means of excavating cultural myths. Navigating the complex tension between biblical and material symbolism, Palmsonntag is a striking encapsulation of the artist’s own efforts to wrest metaphysical sensations from the very elements that form the universe.

Since the 1980s, much of Kiefer’s art has explored the notion that heaven and earth reflect one another: a duality he sees in both the growth of plants themselves, which reach skyward whilst simultaneously burrowing further into the soil, and his own approach to painting. As the artist has said, ‘I work on my paintings from all sides, so when I am working on them there is no up or down. The sky can be reflected in the water or material can come down from the sky. That is part of the content of the paintings. Heaven and earth are interchangeable’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 173). For Kiefer, flux is a potent and necessary force, and in these works, equilibrium seems to possess a cosmic gravity. Indeed, in Palmsonntag, earth and sky appear to be formed of one another, evoking a poignant sense of transformation, a moment of becoming.