Conceived and presented for the opening of Pirelli HangarBicocca in 2004 by a project by Lia Rumma, the permanent site-specific installation by Anselm Kiefer, The Seven Heavenly Palaces, owes its name to the Palaces described in the ancient Jewish treatise Sefer Hechalot, the “Book of Palaces / Sanctuaries” dating back to the IV-V century AD, which tells the symbolic path of spiritual initiation of the one who wants to approach the presence of God.
The name of the site specific installation “The Seven Heavenly Palaces” – conceived and presented for the opening of Pirelli HangarBicocca in 2004 and based on a project by Lia Rumma – was drawn from the palaces described in the ancient Hebrew treatise “Sefer Hechalot”, the “Book of Palaces/ Sanctuaries,” which dates back to the 4th-5th centuries A.D. The volume narrates the symbolic path of spiritual initiation that anyone who wants to become closer to God must undertake.
The seven towers – each of which weighs 90 tons and rises to heights varying between 14 and 18 meters – were created from reinforced concrete using the angular construction modules of shipping containers. The artist has inserted, between the various levels of each tower, lead books and wedges which, compressing beneath the weight of the concrete, further guarantee the static nature of the structure.
More than mere functional value, for Kiefer the use of this metal has symbolic meaning: in fact, lead is traditionally considered the material of melancholy. “The Seven Heavenly Palaces” represents a point of arrival for Kiefer’s entire artistic production, synthesizing his principle themes and projecting them into a new, timeless dimension: they contain an interpretation of ancient Hebrew religion; representation of the ruins of Western Civilization following the Second World War; and projections into a possible future through which the artist invites us to face the present.
Five large canvases – produced between 2009 and 2013, and exhibited for the first time – enrich and expand “The Seven Heavenly Palaces”, the permanent installation by Anselm Kiefer. The additional display in 2015, curated by Vicente Todolí, has reconsidered and conferred new meaning on the artist’s work. These paintings form, together with the “towers”, a single installation entitled “The Seven Heavenly Palaces 2004-2015” which addresses themes already present in the site specific work: large architectural constructions of the past as man’s attempt to ascend to the divine; constellations represented through astronomical numeration.
Thanks to this new display, Kiefer’s artistic practice is further explored through painting, highlighting considerations central to his poetics, such as the relationship between man and nature; or references to the history of thought and western philosophy. Visitors can pass through the space of the “towers” and experience new works, exploring novel perspectives born of the dialogue between the paintings and the installation.
The artist
Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen in Germany in 1945. After studying law and literature, he devoted himself to art. His first works, created in the second half of the 1960s, are influenced by the gesture and work of the artist Joseph Beuys. Between 1993 and 2007 Anselm Kiefer moved to Barjac, in the South of France, where he transformed a 350,000 square meter silk factory into his home-studio. Today he lives and works in Croissy and Paris, but many of his large installations are still kept in Barjac, in a sort of personal museum and total work of art.
In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting “Margarethe” (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan’s well-known poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”).
His works are characterised by an unflinching willingness to confront his culture’s dark past, and unrealised potential, in works that are often done on a large, confrontational scale well suited to the subjects. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or historical places. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with the movements New Symbolism and Neo–Expressionism.
Artistic Process
Generally, Kiefer attributes traditional mythology, books, and libraries as his main subjects and sources of inspiration. In his middle years, his inspiration came from literary figures, namely Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. His later works incorporate themes from Judeo-Christian, ancient Egyptian, and Oriental cultures, which he combines with other motifs. Cosmogony is also a large focus in his works. In all, Kiefer searches for the meaning of existence and “representation of the incomprehensible and the non-representational.”
Philosophy
Kiefer values a “spiritual connection” with the materials he works with, “extracting the spirit that already lives within.” In doing so, he transforms his materials with acid baths and physical blows with sticks and axes, among other processes.
He often chooses materials for their alchemical properties—lead in particular. Kiefer’s initial attraction to lead arose when he had to repair aging pipes in the first house he owned. Eventually, he came to admire its physical and sensory qualities and began to discover more about its connection to alchemy. Physically, Kiefer specifically likes how the metal looks during the heating and melting process when he sees many colors, especially gold, which he associates to the symbolic gold sought by alchemists.
Kiefer’s use of straw in his work represents energy. He claims this is due to straw’s physical qualities, including the color gold and its release of energy and heat when burned. The resulting ash makes way for new creation, thus echoing the motifs of transformation and the cycle of life.
Kiefer also values the balance between order and chaos in his work, stating, “f there is too much order, [the piece] is dead; or if there is much chaos, it doesn’t cohere.” In addition, he cares deeply about the space in which his works reside. He states that his works “lose their power completely” if put in the wrong spaces.
Style and materials
Formally, Kiefer’s work is monumental and figurative (“Without an object I would not make a picture anyway”). His preferred color is gray, the “color of doubt”. content witness the work of a “continuation of the history painting” and an “intensive study of cultural collections.” American Art critics situate him in the tradition of Romantic landscape painting by Caspar David Friedrich.
Kiefer skeptically assesses the “classic work process of the painter, with an idea, sketchbook, execution”, which he does not have; “Because for that I would have to assume a desired result, and I am not interested in that.” “I see my pictures like ruins, or like building blocks that can be put together. They are material with which you can build something, but they are not perfect. They are closer to nothing than to perfection. ” Human works are seldom depicted in his works, when they appear as” icons, symbols anchored in cultural history for people “or as self-portrayals. Recurring topics and subjects are traditional myths, books and libraries. He agreed with an interviewer that his work took place “in the interplay of mythology and ratio”. He was an “artist of the underworld” (“I am an artist of the underworld”), is one of his younger self-characterizations. Armin Zwei understands Kiefer’s painting as an interpretation of the world, not as a visualization of subjective perception, but as an interpretation of the world, “appropriation of the incomprehensible”.
Few contemporary artists have such a strong sense of the obligation of art to deal with the past and ethical issues of the present. At the end of the 1980s, in an “Art Talk” he claimed responsibility for art as follows: “I believe that art must take responsibility, but it shouldn’t stop being art. My content may not be contemporary, but it may be political. ” As art historian Werner Spies states, Kiefer, like only Gerhard Richter,” put an end to the suppression of names, terms and topographies “. The Swiss artist Andrea Lauterwein characterized as a “pictor doctus” (learned painter)in her dissertation on Kiefer and Paul Celan, a painter who was based on broad philosophical and literary references and whose dialogue with the poet Celan was incorporated into his work as a leitmotif.
Through the reception of Celan’s poetry, he had broken the circle of fascination and disgust in the face of National Socialist phantasmagoria and was also able to visualize the Jewish view of the Holocaust and Shoa. The London art historian Norman Rosenthalwrites about the effect of Kiefer’s pictures: “They may cause pain to the Germans, but he is admired abroad because he created complex works during the Hitler period, including Judaism.” This German had a real relationship with his own culture, to Beethoven, Heine, Goethe or Wagner, and he brings “the terrible and the beautiful of his country together in a grand way”. The French art historian Daniel Arasse emphasizes that humor, irony and ridicule is “a constitutive dimension” of his work, which sometimes allows him to “break prohibitions”.
In addition to the poet Paul Celan, Kiefer was also inspired by Ingeborg Bachmann to important works. The pictures Bohemia is by the Sea (1995 and 1996) have the title of a poem by Bachmann. Her verse “Everyone who falls has wings” is also in one of his later paintings from Barjac.
While Kiefer’s early creative period was determined by an almost obsessive examination of German history and culture, in addition to Gnosis and Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), Egyptian and ancient Oriental mythologies and cosmogonies were added as new sources of inspiration in his later work phases, without the old topics completely disappearing.
His works are characterized by the archaic material: in addition to the dominant lead, there are ashes, straw, sunflowers, strands of hair, sand, clay, burnt wood, scraps of fabric, which are often applied in overlapping layers. Kiefer is a “friend of lead”, as he admits himself: “Lead affects me more than any other metal”. He formulated his creed in the paradox: “I hide matter by undressing it.”
In addition to his preference for unconventional materials, Beuys’s thinking is closely linked to the parallels perceived by Kiefer between the roles of the alchemist and artist, the latter of which converts raw material and canvas into symbolic meanings.
Anyone who tries to oversee and organize the entire work of Kiefers so far will always come across the fact that the artist names different works and groups of works created at different times with the same titles, in the words Jürgen Hohmeyer, former cultural editor of Spiegel, is for Kiefer ” Title recycling common practice “. Exemplary for this are his numerous works, groups of works and exhibitions designated with heavenly palaces or towers of heavenly palaces.
Photography
Kiefer began his career creating performances and documenting them in photographs titled Occupations and Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols). Dressed in his father’s Wehrmacht uniform, Kiefer mimicked the Nazi salute in various locations in France, Switzerland and Italy. He asked Germans to remember and to acknowledge the loss to their culture through the mad xenophobia of the Third Reich. In 1969, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz, Karlsruhe, he presented his first single exhibition “Besetzungen (Occupations)” with a series of photographs of controversial political actions.
Painting and sculpture
Kiefer is best known for his paintings, which have grown increasingly large in scale with additions of lead, broken glass, and dried flowers or plants. This results in encrusted surfaces and thick layers of impasto.
By 1970, while studying informally under Joseph Beuys at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, his stylistic leanings resembled Georg Baselitz’s approach. He worked with glass, straw, wood and plant parts. The use of these materials meant that his art works became temporary and fragile, as Kiefer himself was well aware; he also wanted to showcase the materials in such a way that they were not disguised and could be represented in their natural form. The fragility of his work contrasts with the stark subject matter in his paintings. This use of familiar materials to express ideas was influenced by Beuys, who used fat and carpet felt in his works. It is also typical of the Neo-Expressionist style.
Kiefer returned to the area of his birthplace in 1971. In the years that followed, he incorporated German mythology in particular in his work, and in the next decade he studied the Kabbalah, as well as Qabalists like Robert Fludd. He went on extended journeys throughout Europe, the USA and the Middle East; the latter two journeys further influenced his work. Besides paintings, Kiefer created sculptures, watercolors, photographs, and woodcuts, using woodcuts in particular to create a repertoire of figures he could reuse repeatedly in all media over the next decades, lending his work its knotty thematic coherence.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Kiefer made numerous paintings, watercolors, woodcuts, and books on themes interpreted by Richard Wagner in his four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).
In the early 1980s, he created more than thirty paintings, painted photographs, and watercolors that refer in their titles and inscriptions to the Romanian Jewish writer Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”).
A series of paintings which Kiefer executed between 1980 and 1983 depict looming stone edifices, referring to famous examples of National Socialist architecture, particularly buildings designed by Albert Speer and Wilhelm Kreis. The grand plaza in To the Unknown Painter (1983) specifically refers to the outdoor courtyard of Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer in 1938 in honor of the Unknown Soldier. In 1984–85, he made a series of works on paper incorporating manipulated black-and-white photographs of desolate landscapes with utility poles and power lines. Such works, like Heavy Cloud (1985), were an indirect response to the controversy in West Germany in the early 1980s about NATO’s stationing of tactical nuclear missiles on German soil and the placement of nuclear fuel processing facilities.
By the mid-1980s, Kiefer’s themes widened from a focus on Germany’s role in civilization to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involved not only national identity and collective memory, but also occult symbolism, theology and mysticism. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life. During the 1980s his paintings became more physical, and featured unusual textures and materials. The range of his themes broadened to include references to ancient Hebrew and Egyptian history, as in the large painting Osiris and Isis (1985–87). His paintings of the 1990s, in particular, explore the universal myths of existence and meaning rather than those of national identity. From 1995 to 2001, he produced a cycle of large paintings of the cosmos. He also started to turn to sculpture, although lead still remains his preferred medium.
Over the years Kiefer has made many unusual works, but one work stands out among the rest as particularly bizarre—that work being his 20 Years of Solitude piece. Taking over 20 years to create (1971-1991), 20 Years of Solitude is a ceiling-high stack of hundreds of white-painted ledgers and handmade books, strewn with dirt and dried vegetation, whose pages are stained with the artist’s semen. The word solitude in the title references the artists frequent masturbation onto paper during the 20 years it took to create. He asked American art critic Peter Schjeldahl to write a text for a catalog of the masturbation books. Schjeldahl attempted to oblige but ultimately failed in his endeavor. No other critic would take on the task, so the work has largely faded into obscurity.
He would shock the art world yet again at a dinner party in May of 1993. Kiefer and his second wife, Renate Graf, decorated a candlelit commercial loft in New York with white muslin, carpeted the floor with white sand, and staffed it with waiters dressed as mimes with white-face. A handful of art world elite, such as the likes of Sherrie Levine, were served several courses of arcane organ meats, such as pancreas, that were mostly white in color. Not surprisingly, the guests did not find the meal to be particularly appetizing.
Since 2002, Kiefer has worked with concrete, creating the towers destined for the Pirelli warehouses in Milan, the series of tributes to Velimir Khlebnikov (paintings of the sea, with boats and an array of leaden objects, 2004-5), a return to the work of Paul Celan with a series of paintings featuring rune motifs (2004–6), and other sculptures. In 2003, he held his first solo show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg Villa Katz, Anselm Kiefer: Am Anfang, dedicated to a series of new works, centered on the recurring themes of history and myths.
In 2005, he held his second exhibition in Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s Salzburg location, Für Paul Celan, which focused on Kiefer’s preoccupation with the book, linking references to Germanic mythology with the poetry of Paul Celan, a German-speaking Jew from Czernowitz. The exhibition featured eleven works on canvas, a series of bound books shown in display cases, and five sculptures, including one powerful, monumental outdoor sculpture of reinforced concrete and lead elements, two leaden piles of books combined with bronze sunflowers, lead ships and wedges, and two monumental leaden books from the series The Secret Life of Plants. The exhibition toured to Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris and Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, the following year.
In 2006, Kiefer’s exhibition, Velimir Chlebnikov, was first shown in a small studio near Barjac, then moved to White Cube in London, then finishing in the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. The work consists of 30 large (2 x 3 meters) paintings, hanging in two banks of 15 on facing walls of an expressly constructed corrugated steel building that mimics the studio in which they were created. The work refers to the eccentric theories of the Russian futurist philosopher/poet Velimir Chlebnikov, who invented a “language of the future” called “Zaum”, and who postulated that cataclysmic sea battles shift the course of history once every 317 years. In his paintings, Kiefer’s toy-like battleships—misshapen, battered, rusted and hanging by twisted wires—are cast about by paint and plaster waves. The work’s recurrent color notes are black, white, gray, and rust; and their surfaces are rough and slathered with paint, plaster, mud and clay.
In 2007, he became the first artist to be commissioned to install a permanent work at the Louvre, Paris, since Georges Braque some 50 years earlier. The same year, he inaugurated the Monumenta exhibitions series at the Grand Palais in Paris, with works paying special tribute to the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.
In 2009 Kiefer mounted two exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London. A series of forest diptychs and triptychs enclosed in glass vitrines, many filled with dense Moroccan thorns, was titled Karfunkelfee, a term from German Romanticism stemming from a poem by the post-war Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. In The Fertile Crescent, Kiefer presented a group of epic paintings inspired by a trip to India fifteen years earlier where he first encountered rural brick factories. Over the past decade, the photographs that Kiefer took in India “reverberated” in his mind to suggest a vast array of cultural and historical references, reaching from the first human civilization of Mesopotamia to the ruins of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, where he played as a boy. “Anyone in search of a resonant meditation on the instability of built grandeur”, wrote the historian Simon Schama in his catalogue essay, “would do well to look hard at Kiefer’s The Fertile Crescent”.
In Morgenthau Plan (2012), the gallery is filled with a sculpture of a golden wheat field, enclosed in a five-meter-high steel cage. That same year, Kiefer inaugurated Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery space in Pantin, with an exhibition of monumental new works, Die Ungeborenen. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with a letter by Anselm Kiefer and essays by Alexander Kluge and Emmanuel Daydé. He continues to be represented by the gallery and participates in group and solo exhibitions at their various locations.
Books
In 1969 Kiefer began to design books. Early examples are typically worked-over photographs; his more recent books consist of sheets of lead layered with paint, minerals, or dried plant matter. For example, he assembled numerous lead books on steel shelves in libraries, as symbols of the stored, discarded knowledge of history. The book Rhine (1981) comprises a sequence of 25 woodcuts that suggest a journey along the Rhine River; the river is central to Germany’s geographical and historical development, acquiring an almost mythic significance in works such as Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs. Scenes of the unspoiled river are interrupted by dark, swirling pages that represent the sinking of the battleship Bismarck in 1941, during an Atlantic sortie codenamed Rhine Exercise.
Studios
Kiefer’s first large studio was in the attic of his home, a former schoolhouse in Hornbach. Years later he installed his studio in a factory building in Buchen, near Hornbach. In 1988, Kiefer transformed a former brick factory in Höpfingen (also near Buchen) into an extensive artwork including numerous installations and sculptures. In 1991, after twenty years of working in the Odenwald, the artist left Germany to travel around the world–to India, Mexico, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, and the United States. In 1992 he established himself in Barjac, France, where he transformed his 35-hectare studio compound La Ribaute into a Gesamtkunstwerk. A derelict silk factory, his studio is enormous and in many ways is a comment on industrialization. He created an extensive system of glass buildings, archives, installations, storerooms for materials and paintings, subterranean chambers and corridors.
Sophie Fiennes filmed Kiefer’s studio complex in Barjac for her documentary study, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), which recorded both the environment and the artist at work. One critic wrote of the film: “Building almost from the ground up in a derelict silk factory, Kiefer devised an artistic project extending over acres: miles of corridors, huge studio spaces with ambitious landscape paintings and sculptures that correspond to monumental constructions in the surrounding woodland, and serpentine excavated labyrinths with great earthy columns that resemble stalagmites or termite mounds. Nowhere is it clear where the finished product definitively stands; perhaps it is all work in progress, a monumental concept-art organism.”
During 2008, Kiefer left his studio complex at Barjac and moved to Paris. A fleet of 110 lorries transported his work to a 35,000 sq ft (3,300 m2) warehouse in Croissy-Beaubourg, outside of Paris, that had once been the depository for the La Samaritaine department store. A journalist wrote of Kiefer’s abandoned studio complex: “He left behind the great work of Barjac – the art and buildings. A caretaker looks after it. Uninhabited, it quietly waits for nature to take over, because, as we know, over our cities grass will grow. Kiefer spent the summer of 2019 living and working at Barjac.”
Reception
According to art critic Jürgen Hohmeyer, “no other contemporary artist felt such alternating baths of total verdict and adoration” like Kiefer.
At the beginning of the 1980s, a considerable part of the German art criticism of Kiefer was “extremely negative, even disparaging”; his “seemingly affirmative empathy for fascist gestures and symbols” made him extremely unpopular. Kiefer’s ambiguous handling of the German past made the critics overlook the “ironic, provocative, subversive aspects of his work”. Werner Spies chalked him up in 1980 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as an “overdose of Teutschem”. Petra Kipphoff reprimanded his “game with irrationalism and brutality” in the ZEIT.
A scientific examination of pine only started in the second half of the 1980s. The increasing recognition of his work abroad contributed to this. The retrospective of 1984 for the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle went to Paris and Israel in the same year. It received a polyphonic positive response from the Israeli public. But it was only with the traveling exhibition 1987–1989 in the USA and the emphatic reviews from overseas that, according to Spiegel commentary, “were sensationally disproportionate to the reservations at home”, did his work receive the due recognition in Germany. The influential Anglo-Saxon art critic Robert Hughescalled him the “best painter of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic”. Even then, Werner Spies suspected the American-Jewish audience of an “undetected masochistic attraction due to the dangerous and the beauty of the dark and burned, which is shown so concretely in the pictures”.
After the jaw with the awarding of the prestigious summer 1990 Wolf Prize, the political correctness of his art, represented by the descendants of the victims by the Jerusalem Knesset had been confirmed, silent such allegations. Less than 20 years later (2008), one of his former harshest critics, Werner Spies, gave the laudatory speech at the award ceremonyGerman Book Trade Peace Prize to Kiefer. On the occasion of the retrospective at the Center Pompidou 2015–2016 in Paris, the form of “artistic mourning”, which is particularly appreciated in France, was again critically questioned.
Awarded with numerous prizes and honors, Kiefer is now one of the world’s most important contemporary artists. He has been in the top ten on the art compass of the 100 most sought-after contemporary artists worldwide for years; In 2015 he was ranked 6th.
The Exhibition
The seven towers – weighing 90 tons each and varying in height between 14 and 18 meters – are made of reinforced concrete using angular modules of containers for the transport of goods as construction elements. Anselm Kiefer has inserted lead books and wedges between the various floors of each tower, which, compressing under the weight of the concrete, better guarantee the static nature of the structures. For the artist, the use of this metal has not only a functional value, but also a symbolic one: lead, in fact, is considered in the tradition as a matter of melancholy. The Seven Heavenly Palacesthey represent a point of arrival of the artist’s entire work and summarize his main themes by projecting them into a new dimension out of time: the interpretation of the ancient Jewish religion; the representation of the ruins of the West after the Second World War; the projection into a possible future from which the artist invites us to look at our present.
Since September 2015, five large canvases, created between 2009 and 2013, enrich and expand the permanent installation of Anselm Kiefer. The rearrangement, curated by Vicente Todolí, rethinks and gives a new meaning to the artist’s work. The five great canvases – Jaipur (2009); two works from the Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles series (2011);Alchemie (2012); Die Deutsche Heilslinie (2012-2013) – are exhibited in the space of the Navate which houses the permanent installation, giving a new meaning to Anselm Kiefer’s masterpiece. The pictorial works form, together with the “towers”, a single installation – entitled I Sette Palazzi Celesti 2004–2015 – which addresses themes already present in the site-specific work – the great architectural constructions of the past as an attempt by man to ascend to the divine and the constellations represented through astronomical numbering – and also add some central reflections in the artist’s poetics, such as the relationship between man and nature, references to the history of western thought and philosophy.
Sefiroth
The first of the seven towers to be created, “Sefiroth” is also the shortest (14 meters). The tower culminates with a pile of seven lead books and presents neon lights that form the Hebrew names of Sefiroth, viewed in Cabala as representations of the expressions and tools of God and forming the very material of creation: Kether (crown), Chochmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), Chessed (loving-kindness), Geburah (strength), Tiffereth (beauty or majesty), Netzach (eternity or victory), Hod (splendour), Yesod (foundation), Malkut (kingdom) and Daad (understanding and wisdom).
Melancholia
“Melancholia” is distinguished most of all by the completion of the last covering, a polyhedron taken from the engraving of the same name created in 1514 by Albrecht Dürer, which became one of the artist’s most famous allegorical images. Artists were defined as “those born under Saturn,” since people believed that the planet of melancholy represented the artist’s contemplative, ambivalent character.
At the base of the tower there are the so-called “falling stars,” small sheets of glass and strips of paper marked with alpha-numerical series that correspond to NASA’s classification of celestial bodies.
Ararat
“Ararat” is named after the mountain in Asia Minor where, according to Biblical tradition, Noah’s ark finally came to rest. The ark is represented by a small model in lead present at the top of the tower, symbolizing a vehicle of peace and salvation, but also a warship, and therefore a vehicle of destruction and desolation.
Magnetic Field Lines
The most imposing tower in the entire installation stands 18 meters high, and is characterized by a series of lead films running all the way down around it, ultimately reaching the base and laying alongside an empty film reel and a camera made of the same material.
The choice of lead, a material through which light cannot pass (and therefore prevents the production of any images), can be interpreted in different ways: from the Nazi attempt to erase Jewish culture and ethnic minorities, to the iconoclastic battle that periodically runs through Western culture, to the Byzantine era all the way to the Lutheran era and the conception, often cited by Kiefer, that “every work of art cancels out those that precede it”.
JH & WH
These two towers are disseminated at the base of meteorites that have been numbered with molten lead in irregular shapes, symbolizing the creation myth presented in several Cabala texts. The two towers are equally complementary at their crowns, culminating with writing in neon light detailing respectively the letters “JH” and “WH” which, when united according to the rules of Hebrew phonetics, form the world “Yahweh”, an unpronounceable term in the Jewish tradition.
Tower of the Falling Pictures
The “Torre dei Quadri Cadenti” owes its name once again to the objects present from the top to the base of the construction: a series of wood and lead frames containing thick sheets of glass, many of which have been broken at irregular intervals. Surprisingly the frames do not display any images. Once again, Anselm Kiefer deals with the theme of missing imagery and its potentially multiple cross-references.
Jaipur
The title of this painting is taken from Jaipur, a city Kiefer visited during his numerous travels throughout India. The canvas portrays a nocturnal landscape: on the lower section the artist has painted an architectural structure that reminds the viewer of an inverted pyramid; above, a starry sky. The constellations visible in the sky, connected with lines, are numbered utilizing NASA’s classification system. From a thematic point of view, this artwork appears to be the one most closely connected with “The Seven Heavenly Palaces”: the pyramid becomes a symbol of man’s vain attempt to move closer to the divine.
Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles
In these two paintings from the series “Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles”, Kiefer portrays a desert landscape, onto which he sets black sunflower seeds – a recurring element in the artist’s work. These symbolize fallen stars, black on white, as if they were negative prints. Adding different materials to the surface of the painting, the artist passes beyond the limit between painting and sculpture, seeming to invite the viewer to enter his world.
Alchemie
“Alchemie” is made up of two canvases set side-by-side that portray a dry, arid landscape in which the earth appears entirely sterile. A “rainfall” of sunflower seeds is the only sign of life and the hope of regrowth. The element connecting the canvases is a set of balance scales containing salt on one dish and sunflower seeds on the other: opposing symbols of sterility and fertility. These are a clear citation of the artist’s interest in alchemy, an esoteric science that aimed to transform lead into gold, and an allegory of man’s tension toward perfection and the divine.
Die Deutsche Heilslinie
The largest painting in the Pirelli HangarBicocca’s display symbolically and literally portrays – as the title communicates – the history of German salvation. Set on a rainbow trajectory that connects earth and sky and crosses the entire surface, Kiefer transcribes, inserted within a historical-philosophical path running from the thinking of Illuminists to Karl Marx, the names of German philosophers who supported the idea of salvation through the actions of a leader. At the base of the painting stands the figure of a man, portrayed from behind as he gazes, solitary and alone, out over a landscape that echoes the romantic paintings by the artist Caspar David Friedrich. All around are set the names of thinkers who supported the idea that salvation can be achieved through the recognition of one’s own individual identity
Pirelli HangarBicocca
Pirelli HangarBicocca, also known as HangarBicocca, is an exhibition space dedicated to modern and contemporary art located in the Bicocca district of Milan. The building was originally an industrial plant of the AnsaldoBreda company, then acquired by Pirelli in 2004 and subsequently converted into 1,500 square meters of exhibition galleries.
Pirelli HangarBicocca is a non-profit foundation, established in 2004, created and entirely supported by Pirelli, which has converted a former industrial plant in Milan into an institution for producing and promoting contemporary art.
This dynamic center for experimentation and research covers 15,000 square meters, making it one of the largest contiguous exhibition spaces in Europe. It presents major solo shows every year by Italian and international artists, with each project conceived to work in close relation to the architecture of the complex, and explored in depth through a calendar of parallel events. Admission to the space and the shows is completely free of charge, and facilitators are on hand to help the public connect with the art. Since 2013, Vicente Todolí has been the foundation’s Artistic Director.
The complex, which once housed a locomotive factory, includes an area for public services and educational activities, and three exhibition spaces whose original twentieth-century architectural features have been left clearly visible: Shed, Navate, and Cubo. As well as its exhibitions program and cultural events, Pirelli HangarBicocca also permanently houses one of Anselm Kiefer’s most important site-specific works, “The Seven Heavenly Palaces 2004-2015”, commissioned for the opening of Pirelli HangarBicocca.