Anselm Kiefer - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London

  • Exhibited

    London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, Anselm Kiefer - New Paintings and Sculpture, June 24 - August 19, 1989

  • Catalogue Essay

    "Gray is toneless and immobile. This immobility, however, is of a different character from the tranquillity of green, which is the product of two active colors and lies midway between them. Gray is therefore the disconsolate lack of motion. The deeper this gray becomes, the more the disconsolate element is emphasized, until it becomes suffocating.” (Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 1914)

    Born in 1945 in post-World War II Germany, Anselm Kiefer grew up surrounded by physical as well as psychological destruction and devastation. Processing and reflecting these traumatic times through his art, Kiefer changed the art world of the 1970s and 1980s as much as an artist could. Mythology, prehistory, cosmology, life and death are among his most frequent subject matters, always trying to unpack mythic pathos and historical ironies of modern German horrors. Yet his art does not form a linear progression, repeatedly returning to titles and themes as well as materials, a conscious choice of different media, which embody an allegorical approach to painting and photography. In the present lot, Tiefes Wasser, Kiefer uses black and white photographic images. Gathering imagery for its indexical relationship to memory; a memory of the German past, covered up in a permanence of grayness, in which the slight identifiable imagery slowly seems to fade, yet never quite disappears – a realisation that it will never in fact dissolve.

257

Tiefes Wasser (Deep Water)

1967-1988
Two black and white photographs with dispersion on lead mounted on a wooden panel in the artist's steel frame.
95 1/4 x 51 1/2 in. (242 x 131 cm).

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for £132,000

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Evening Sale
13 October 2007, 4pm
London