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ANSELM KIEFER (b. 1945) DIE WOGE (THE WAVE) canvas, cloth, paint, tin and cotton on board 110 1/4...

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ANSELM KIEFER (b. 1945) DIE WOGE (THE WAVE) canvas, cloth, paint, tin and cotton on board 110 1/4...
ANSELM KIEFER
(b. 1945)
DIE WOGE (THE WAVE)
canvas, cloth, paint, tin
and cotton on board
110 1/4 x 149 5/8 in. (280 x 380 cm)
executed in 1995 <p>PROVENANCE
Kukje Gallery, SEOUL
Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, ZURICH
Private collection, SWITZERLAND <p>EXHIBITED
SEOUL, Kukje Gallery, ANSELM KIEFER, September 22-October 17, 1995, pl. 1 (illustrated)
Strange it is, to inhabit the earth no longer,
To have no more use for habits hardly acquired -
Roses, and other things of singular promise,
No longer to see them in terms of a human future;
To be no more all that we nurtured and carried
In endlessly anxious hands, and to leave by the roadside
One's own name even, like a child's broken doll.
Rainer Maria Rilke, THE FIRST ELEGY, 1923
In order to address the moral dilemma of artistic production in post-Holocaust Germany, Anselm Kiefer rejected classical painting techniques in the early 1980s. At that point, Kiefer began using a wide range of unconventional materials in his work, allowing each substance to detonate its own inherent wealth of associations. This practice continued throughout the 1990s, when the artist turned to other subjects freighted with profound moral issues and cosmic dimensions, highly charged by poetry, from such poets as
Rainer Maria Rilke. In DIE WOGE (THE WAVE), for example, Kiefer deftly mixes cotton clothing, tin, and ashes to address the cabbalistic narrative of the she-demon, Lilith.
An ancient Babylonian woman who figures prominently in the Bible, the Talmud, and the Cabbala, Lilith is usually portrayed as a demonic female figure who rebels against the word of God. Identified in the Cabbala as "the first Eve," Lilith was created from the same clay as Adam and demanded to be treated as his equal. When God refused her request, Lilith denounced her creator and flew away to the shores of the Red Sea, where she became an unholy mother to all of the faithless.
Since 1990, when Kiefer created two books entitled LILITH and LILITH'S DAUGHTERS, the artist has repeatedly used empty dresses to symbolize this mythical character. He clearly maintained this practice in the present work, which wedges three cotton dresses between two sheets of tin. Bent and twisted into rippling surfaces, the metal plates cascade across the canvas, lap at the ghostly garments like water, and identify the seaside location of Lilith's retreat from God. As if to render this haunting tableau spiritually barren, Kiefer has cloaked the entire canvas in an ashen gray.
Despite the negative associations that typically surround the figure of Lilith, Kiefer seems to identify with this rebellious outcast, whose symbolic dresses have appeared in many of his strongest paintings in recent years. As Daniel Arasse has suggested, "It is evidently Lilith's original, spiritual stature and the violence of her rebellion that fascinate Kiefer, who places many works under the aegis of 'the first Eve,' who chose exile of her own accord, after uttering the 'ineffable Name,' and thus became the embodiment of a 'negative revelation.' If, as Doreet LeVitte Harten suggests, Lilith points the way to the unnamed presence that we sense in the background of most of Kiefer's works, it is precisely because of her rebellion and voluntary exile. Through the enormity of her action, this primeval creature becomes a worldly manifestation of the meaning that was withdrawn from the world and consequently becomes a guardian spirit for Kiefer's art and his creative ambition.... Kiefer puts himself into a position equivalent to that of Lilith: he takes up the meaning withdrawn from the world at the moment of creation, and expresses it in his exile. If Kiefer's art is melancholy, it is because it expresses the melancholy of one of Lilith's sons" (Daniel Arasse, ANSELM KIEFER, NEW YORK: Harry N. Abrams, 2001, p. 286).
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