Anselm Kiefer - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London Friday, March 8, 2024 | Phillips

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  • “I don’t consider myself a Platonist but I think that the spirit is contained in the material and it is the artist’s mission to extract it.”
    —Anselm Kiefer

    Elegiac, still, and silent, Anselm Kiefer’s Piéta is a deeply provocative and moving work that draws universal themes of belief, the transience of life, and the human capacity for love and suffering into dialogue with the artist’s nuanced understanding of German history and an investigation into the limits of representation itself. How, Kiefer asks, can art approach the finality of death and the pain of existential suffering? How do certain pictorial motifs or traditions transcend their own historical moment to speak directly and profoundly to the human condition? How do we confront the trauma of our own recent history?

     

    Drawing on a long history of Christian iconography focused on the figure of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of her son after his crucifixion on the cross, Kiefer’s Piéta evokes the expression of religious piety and sacrifice concentrated in that image, even as it departs from more typical presentations of the motif. One of several works executed in the same year and bearing the same title, Piéta here of course immediately recalls Michelangelo’s preeminent symbol of maternal love, devotion, and sacrifice, the sculpture’s smooth marble surface highly expressive in its juxtaposition of tender details and exquisitely rendered musculature. Her arms open and head bowed, Michelangelo’s Mary makes her grief accessible and comprehensible to us, paradoxically offering us a shield and protection from our pain even as she exposes it to us and serving - as Kiefer has identified - our ‘need for an illusion. For shelter and safety.’i

     

    Removing Mary from the scene, Kiefer also strips away these familiar and comforting parameters for contextualising death and suffering. While the mourning Marian motif presents us with the idealised image of the sacrifice of both mother and child, Kiefer’s Piéta is by contrast twice removed from us, first by the glass casket and again by the tangle of brambles that obscure the body buried beneath. Revealed to us in flashes of luminously pale flesh, stark against the earthy ground, the painted figure is rendered on a human scale, the gentle curve of its skull and upturned face providing touching details, full of pathos.  While the grieving Mary offers us a cipher for our own grief and expression of piety, in removing her from the scene, Kiefer’s Piéta allows us to confront the material reality of death and our own desire for transcendence more directly, recalling in its compositional arrangement the visceral shock of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

     

    Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in The Tomb, 1520-1522, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel

    In this respect, while the brambles evoke Christ’s woven crown of thorns, the earth itself here takes on special significance, the ‘Mother’ to which we are all returned to, and which promises continual renewal and new life. As is typical of Kiefer’s work, landscape here is ‘deployed as the quiet witness to historical change, the vast impartial canvas upon which history is successively painted – and painted over.’ii

     

    As Kiefer has described, his childhood was ‘intensively Catholic’, learning Mass by rote even before he learned to write.iii In Piéta, we can clearly see the extent to which these important early intellectual frameworks continue to shape the artist’s thinking in close dialogue with other important aspects of practice, generating a ‘labyrinth of associations among a diversity of recycled personal motifs, mythic narratives, and historical references’ which here amplifies the artist’s deep connection to the landscape, Judeo-Christian iconography, and to art historical tradition.iv

     

    Exploring the complex terrain between the material reality of death and spiritual desire for transcendence, Kiefer’s Piéta places the artist as intermediary, the figure interned within the glass in fact an oblique self-portrait. As such, Piéta also connects seemingly disparate elements of Kiefer’s own practice, making reference to the artist’s early 1970s photo-based works and the series of Reclining Man pieces produced by the artist during the 1990s, including the monumental Athanor, also executed in 2007 and now held as part of the permanent collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. 

     

    Responding to the pervasive Christian theme of sorrow, Kiefer proposes art as a mode of salvation, one that takes on poignant significance in the devastating loss of life and profound suffering that the 20th century bore witness to. Strikingly poetic in its stark beauty, Piéta belongs to the cycle of works first presented in Kiefer’s 2008 exhibition, Maria durch ein Dornwald ging (Maria Walks amid the Thorn), and remains a profoundly expressive and highly personal reflection on the relationships between Christian dogma, artmaking, and 20th century history. 

     

    i Anselm Kiefer, quoted in, ‘I secrefy matter by divesting it. A Conversation with Anselm Kiefer’, Anselm Kiefer: Maria durch ein Dornwald ging, exh. cat., Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, 2008, p. 118.

    ii Joe Martin Lin-Hill, ‘Making Meaning Beyond Landscape’, Anselm Kiefer: Beyond Landscape, exh. cat., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 2014, p. 31. 

    iii Anselm Kiefer, quoted in, ‘I secrefy matter by divesting it. A Conversation with Anselm Kiefer’, Anselm Kiefer: Maria durch ein Dornwald ging, exh. cat., Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, 2008, p. 118.

    iv Joe Martin Lin-Hill, ‘Making Meaning Beyond Landscape’, Anselm Kiefer: Beyond Landscape, exh. cat., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 2014, p. 34. 

    • Provenance

      White Cube, London
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

PROPERTY FROM AN ESTEEMED PRIVATE COLLECTION

144

Pietà

oil, emulsion, acrylic, shellac, brambles, cardboard and dried roses on canvas, in artist's frame
191.8 x 381.4 x 35 cm (75 1/2 x 150 1/8 x 13 3/4 in.)
Executed in 2007.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£300,000 - 500,000 ‡♠

Contact Specialist

Simon Tovey
Specialist, Associate Director, Head of Day Sale
+44 7502 428 688
stovey@phillips.com

 

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

London Auction 8 March 2024