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拍品专文
Colossal both in scale and in the weight of its themes, Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn) (2001) is a seismic and richly sculptural work by Anselm Kiefer. It follows a recurrent theme that the artist has pursued since the late 1970s exploring the concept of the infinite number of unborn people and possibilities. Works with the same title appear in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Yale University Art Gallery. Die Ungeborenen distils many of the historical and mystical concerns that flow through Kiefer’s labyrinthine oeuvre. As Daniel Arasse writes: ‘One thing leads to another, associations are reiterated and altered, an endless thread is spun from work to work, from physical objects to motifs, from one decade to another, giving a sense of unity of Kiefer’s art and of this same unity as an enigma’ (Anselm Kiefer, London, 2001, p. 20).
Kiefer’s ideas are here incarnated in a vast expanse resembling a furrowed field in winter, which appears to recede into an endless distance. The scene is created through a prodigious accretion of massed black, brown, grey and white acrylic paint that swirls and crashes across the canvas with palpable physicality, as if about to erupt. Kiefer has mixed his paint with soil, ash and a shellac emulsion, further coarsening and diversifying the texture of the sculpted landscape. In the centre he has fixed a spindly white branch, its bare forks reaching out so that it evokes a complete tree. These are hung with doll-sized smocks made from lead, each of which has its own stitching. Coils of wire dangle around the objects, at once protecting and restricting. The entire scene is painted atop a layer of photographic paper laid on canvas, tying it to a medium used to embed memories.
Die Ungeborenen forms part of Kiefer’s lifelong excavation of German history. Its vast expanse summons the spectres of Romantic artists like Caspar David Friedrich, whose art was once core to German self-conception. The barren field references the National Socialist belief in Blut und Boden (‘blood and soil’), the notion that the German people are uniquely bound to their land. Kiefer questions this hubristic, backward-gazing certainty. His landscape is despoiled, but might also be the foundation from which something new and more hopeful can spring. ‘Rubble is like the blossom of a plant’, said Kiefer in 2008, ‘it is the radiant high point of an incessant metabolism, the beginning of a rebirth’ (quoted in R. Davey, ‘In the Beginning is the End and in the End is the Beginning’, in Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014, p. 49).
The lead garments can be seen to represent the unborn themselves, beings that have never but could still come into existence. Kiefer has a longstanding engagement with alchemy, and in particular practitioners such as the early modern English physician and occultist Robert Fludd. Alchemists viewed lead as the base metal, the lowest matter that could be transmuted into gold and spiritual energy. Kiefer’s heavy smocks suggest the potential for such transformation, the lowly wreck of the Earth elevated to a higher realm. They might also embody the children tragically lost, or denied their birth, through the ravages of twentieth-century history: a 2011 work titled Die Ungeborenen in Yale adds serial numbers to the clothes, carrying echoes of the Holocaust. The dresses and branches appear in other works referencing Lilith, a figure from Hebrew folklore known to snatch away newborn children. Consolidating an intricate web of history, mythology and esoteric philosophy, Die Ungeborenen is an awe-inspiring articulation of Kiefer’s unmistakable vision.
Kiefer’s ideas are here incarnated in a vast expanse resembling a furrowed field in winter, which appears to recede into an endless distance. The scene is created through a prodigious accretion of massed black, brown, grey and white acrylic paint that swirls and crashes across the canvas with palpable physicality, as if about to erupt. Kiefer has mixed his paint with soil, ash and a shellac emulsion, further coarsening and diversifying the texture of the sculpted landscape. In the centre he has fixed a spindly white branch, its bare forks reaching out so that it evokes a complete tree. These are hung with doll-sized smocks made from lead, each of which has its own stitching. Coils of wire dangle around the objects, at once protecting and restricting. The entire scene is painted atop a layer of photographic paper laid on canvas, tying it to a medium used to embed memories.
Die Ungeborenen forms part of Kiefer’s lifelong excavation of German history. Its vast expanse summons the spectres of Romantic artists like Caspar David Friedrich, whose art was once core to German self-conception. The barren field references the National Socialist belief in Blut und Boden (‘blood and soil’), the notion that the German people are uniquely bound to their land. Kiefer questions this hubristic, backward-gazing certainty. His landscape is despoiled, but might also be the foundation from which something new and more hopeful can spring. ‘Rubble is like the blossom of a plant’, said Kiefer in 2008, ‘it is the radiant high point of an incessant metabolism, the beginning of a rebirth’ (quoted in R. Davey, ‘In the Beginning is the End and in the End is the Beginning’, in Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014, p. 49).
The lead garments can be seen to represent the unborn themselves, beings that have never but could still come into existence. Kiefer has a longstanding engagement with alchemy, and in particular practitioners such as the early modern English physician and occultist Robert Fludd. Alchemists viewed lead as the base metal, the lowest matter that could be transmuted into gold and spiritual energy. Kiefer’s heavy smocks suggest the potential for such transformation, the lowly wreck of the Earth elevated to a higher realm. They might also embody the children tragically lost, or denied their birth, through the ravages of twentieth-century history: a 2011 work titled Die Ungeborenen in Yale adds serial numbers to the clothes, carrying echoes of the Holocaust. The dresses and branches appear in other works referencing Lilith, a figure from Hebrew folklore known to snatch away newborn children. Consolidating an intricate web of history, mythology and esoteric philosophy, Die Ungeborenen is an awe-inspiring articulation of Kiefer’s unmistakable vision.