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Artist or Maker: Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945)

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Provenance: Acquired from the artist
Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Salzburg
Acquired from the above by the present owner

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Exhibited: Salzburg, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Anselm Kiefer: Am Anfang, July-September 2003, pp. 62-63 (illustrated in color).

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Notes: In addressing Germany's fraught past, no other artist has navigated the difficult terrain between the possibility of transcendence and the necessity of remembrance as dramatically and provocatively as Anslem Kiefer. His art dictates its role as a mediator to painful national tragedies and as a measure of passage towards an enlightened future. Merkaba, 2002 depicts Kiefer's homeland of Germany, not as the phoenix rising from ashes but as a dominant gray heaviness, overwhelming and inescapable, even for the artist himself.

Kiefer, a German Catholic, returns to Judaism throughout his work to recognize, explore, and pay homage to the faith his country and religion horrendously persecuted for centuries. The Kabbalah, deeply rooted in verbal traditions, becomes a challenging visual subject for Kiefer. He has been called a "Kabbalistic iconographer," transforming verbal mysticism into visual symbolism (H. Bloom, Anselm Kiefer: Troping without End, Gagosian Gallery, exh. cat., Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba, 2002, p. 25). Merkaba transforms pre-Kabbalistic imagery of the earliest mystical texts of Judaism into visual tropes of transcendence.

According to the Kabbalah, the Merkaba and Hechaloth literature deals specifically with ascent to the seven heavenly palaces or temples, which represent the seven attainments of divine spirituality. This theme has been visited numerous times in Kiefer's mature works of the past two decades, in all media and scale. Merkaba means "divine chariot," specifically the vehicle of passage through the seven heavenly palaces before one arrives at the throne of god. In Merkaba, the chariot is a boat made from the artist's iconic and symbolic lead. Suspended from wire at the top of the canvas, the sea-bound vessel flies through the grey landscape of Kiefer's homeland, making it seem all the more divine.

In the arduous path to redemption, Kiefer's work registers in purgatory. His ability to interweave myth and mysticism with 20th Century political realities explores various strands of Germany history; he expresses this synthesis through multiple materials. Oil paint, charcoal and plaster create the antithesis of the ideal landscape; the grey canvas renders a permanently overcast sky -- a future and fate inescapable and a sense of insurmountable and inconsolable loss, then depletion, absence and finally lifelessness. Wassily Kandinsky wrote of the color: "Gray is toneless and immobile. This immobility, however, is of a different character from the tranquility 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" (W. Kandinsky, "On the Spiritual in Art", as reproduced in K. Lindsay and P. Vergo, eds., Kandinksy: Complete Writings on Art, New York, 1982, p.186). The surface of the painting is rough and unforgiving, symbolizing a landscape, country and perhaps an artist scarred so completely that salvation is futile, no matter the amount of mourning, remembrance or time passed.

Ultimately, although Kiefer's art openly addresses its failures at alchemy, "like the Kabbalah, Kiefer's art transcends its times -- rises above history like the gray sky he maps and paints, as though he was memorializing a collapsed dome -- which is why it will endure, that is, speak for eternity, as the ineffable Holocaust does" (D. Kuspit, Artnet Magazine, December 19, 2002).