“ What interests me is the transformation, not the monument. I don’t construct ruins, but I feel ruins are moments when things show themselves. A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is the moment when things can start again.” ANSELM KIEFER


Revered for his multifaceted investigation of myth, memory and guilt, Anselm Kiefer has generated a body of work that confronts legacies as much as it invites collective healing. Stemming from a generation of artists who endeavoured to negotiate the national identity of post-World War II Germany and the irreparable destruction of the Holocaust, Kiefer’s monumental oeuvre, spanning painting, sculpture and photography, responds to historical narratives that have been appropriated and propagated for political gain. By reclaiming and even re-contextualizing loaded narratives, the artist creates a dialogue between meta-narratives, civilizations throughout history and his cultural past.

Materializing in intimately sized paintings, large-scale canvases and sculpture, the artist’s most recent series, titled Alkahest, delves into the process of alchemy and its symbolic association with spiritual transformation. Alkahest, a term used for a universal solvent that can dissolve any substance was also associated with the philosopher’s stone, which was believed to be the elixir of life, a symbol of perfection and enlightenment. Water is the closest known element to signify Alkahest, an element that carries great significance in Kiefer’s practice: “I often lay pictures on the floor and pour water over them, or pour on water that has paint dissolved in it. So I’m exposing them to dilution.[...] Water has to do with erosion. Whole mountains, and sediments that have accumulated over millions of years, are carried down to the sea by water. Water contributes to the cycle. Rock that looks as though it will last forever is dissolved, crushed to sand and mud.” (A. Kiefer, 2009, in Anselm Kiefer: Alkahest, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg 2011.)

During the time this series was created, Kiefer was honoured in Germany and the United States, awarded with the Berliner Bär B.Z.-Kulturpreis as well as the Leo Baeck Medal in recognition of his contributions to German and Jewish reconciliation. Certainly, Alkahest is a culmination of the artist’s formidable use of imagery and critical exploration, an epic in scope and complexity. Pervaded by powerful notions of metamorphosis, Kiefer’s series is based on narratives inspired by the philosophical writing of Martin Heidegger, the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as Nordic mythology and biblical stories taken from the Old Testament. The present lot, Samson and Delilah, 2011, is an exemplary work from the Alkahest series, at once majestic and loaded, the viewer is presented with an awe-inspiring perspective as we gaze over a great expanse of mountain range looming over a quiet village. Affixed directly onto the canvas by two hanging wires is a large rifle incised with the name SAMSON. Floating directly above the rifle, another inscription appears hovering in the sky, Hebron, a term roughly translated to mean friend or alliance. Of course, the appearance of this word could also denote the proper name of an actual place, Mount Hebron, located in the southern West Bank and extending into Israel. This region was known for its Israelite and Hasmonean kingdoms during classical antiquity and also the geographical location of the city of Hebron.

The biblical story of Samson and Delilah is well known in Western mythology, depicting the heroic Samson, a Nazirite bestowed with herculean strength and chosen by God to liberate the Israelites from the Philistines. While the powerful Samson was chosen to do God’s bidding, he was nonetheless a complex and seemingly volatile character who lead a path of destruction and self-destruction. His demise was attributed to Delilah, a Philistine woman with whom he fell in love and who ultimately betrayed him. In trusting Delilah with the secret source to his strength, which lay in his hair, Samson finds himself deceived by his love, sheared of his mane and subsequently abandoned by God. Taken prisoner and blinded by the Philistines, Samson manages one last act of super human strength, using his power to collapse a large temple, killing thousands of Philistines and himself. Kiefer alludes to this narrative not only through the more literal use of names but through the symbolism and imagery informed by a long history of romanticism and landscape painting. The story of Samson and Delilah is one that permeates the annals of art history, inspiring canonical figures such as Albrecht Dürer, Rubens, Max Lieberman and Sigmar Polke to name a few. Certainly, in this vein, Anselm Kiefer can be positioned as a history and landscape artist.

Contemplating the present lot, the viewer takes on an omniscient perspective, taking in the breathtaking expanse of snowy mountains and the quiet village below, a seemingly peaceful scene. However, the exaggerated proportion of the rusted rifle in comparison to the sleepy village presents us with an unsettling scenario. Here, the weapon is at once threatening and yet, due to its dematerialised state, in a state of decline, it is almost rendered powerless. Thus, Kiefer’s metaphor of water diluting mountains comes to mind. The chimneys of each rustic home fill the cool air with smoke stacks, evidence of a bustling life within an otherwise still scene, blissfully unaware of intimidation. Suddenly, the rifle appears archaic, like a relic placed on top of a mantle. In this way, Kiefer’s Samson and Delilah reveals a complex psychological portrait of a power struggle. Furthermore, it demonstrates the larger issues of intercultural conflict and a collective psyche in the wake of a terrifying event or terrorist act.

Reflecting on the notion of canvas as landscape and the implication of objects, Kiefer’s practice can be placed in direct dialogue with Rauschenburg’s Combines, specifically the present lot in conversation with Rauschenberg’s seminal Canyon of 1959. While Rauschenberg used found materials to undermine illusion and unitary meanings, Canyon manages to draw from the everyday as much as it draws from the art canon. Canyon, while defying delineated boundaries between art and sculpture, offers several interpretations, one which is that it references Greek mythology, specifically the abduction of Ganymede. A subject of countless historical paintings, Ganymede, was a beautiful young mortal of Troy abducted by Zeus, who had taken the form of an eagle, and immortalized as the cupbearer for the gods of Olympus. When observing Canyon, one notes the collaged image of a young child extending his hand upwards juxtaposed with the dominant presence of a taxidermied eagle. Wings spread, Rauschenberg’s eagle is captured in a moment of action, its elegant form appears to lift the entire painting. Although known as a cunning predator, the cultural symbolism of the eagle in the American psyche represents the fight of freedom, a dominant presence over a vast landscape and the strength of a people. A regal icon amongst the materials that compose Canyon, here seemingly unrelated objects reveal fragments of civilization and myth as well as the fragmentation of the post-World War II era.

Both drawing on antiquity and narratives of betrayal, the rifle and eagle, like trophies of yore, manage to evoke a sense of mysticism and frontier romanticism in Kiefer and Rauschenberg’s work. This narrative is central to another prominent German artist’s practice; Joseph Beuys. Viewing performance as a vehicle for transformation and self-healing, Beuys utilized talismans such as fat and felt to reference traumatic events and his experience of war. Taping into a shamanistic or messianic persona, Beuys’ most recognizable performances or actions, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974, found the artist travelling by plane to the United States where he was transported directly to the René Block Gallery in New York where he was wrapped in a felt blanket, used a shepherd’s staff and received daily copies of the Wall Street Journal. Beuys spent several days inside the gallery, sharing the space with a live coyote. As with Rauschenberg’s Canyon and Kiefer’s Samson and Delilah, here, the inclusion of wildlife at once juxtaposes notions of authority, the natural world and the unknown as much as it evokes spiritualism, shamanism, mythology and the great expanse. For Beuys, performing as a healer carries references to paganism just as Kiefer’s work references alchemy.

The desire to transmutate, to transform the ailments of the physical world both distinguishes these artists from previous art practices and links them to the primordial. Kiefer’s paintings act not only as “figurative images according to a disciplinary logic, but as ‘environmental’ articulations, or rather as a reference to life and to society: a set of historical values, of current conditions and future hypotheses”, (G. Celant. “Ut picture poesis,” Anselm Kiefer, Bilbao, 2007, p. 37). As an artist, Kiefer’s talent lies in his ability to move between these referential spaces, manipulating the philosophical and political myths that occupy Western mythology. These myths are crucial allegories for expression within Kiefer’s visual language, as they represent an artistic effort to reconcile a rupture within the icons, myths, and themes of German culture.

Samson and Delilah represents Kiefer’s ability to construct highly complex metaphors rich with layers of collective memory. The present lot, which is a modern adaptation of the eponymously titled biblical story, relocates the physical, emotional and spiritual relations between civilizations − it is a masterpiece and certainly a museum worthy piece. Here, quotation becomes Kiefer’s strategy for resurrection: “a means of inversion, a kind of hologram, something spanning the space between past and future. We can therefore regard Kiefer’s referential method as a model of memory itself, in which a phantom presence of the past suddenly breaks into and immobilizes the present”, (A. Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer, Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory, New York, 2007, p. 15)