Anselm Kiefer

Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Los Angeles, Gagosian Gallery, Anselm Kiefer, 2008

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to convey fully the highly sculptural nature of the work. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Anselm Kiefer's Velimir Chlebnikow Schicksale der Völker embodies his historically significant, world-renowned and uniquely poetic aesthetic. As ever, Kiefer's frame of reference is dense and complex. The work's title, scrawled across the top of the composition, announces the nature of Kiefer's undertaking. Firstly, it references Velimir Chlebnikov, a Russian futurist poet who concocted esoteric mathematical calculations with which he sought to explain the course of history. The second part of the title Schicksale der Völker translates as "fate of the people", quoting Kiefer's hand written inscription on the walls of his 2005-06 exhibition Für Chlebnikov at White Cube, London and at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Conneticut: "Time, Measure of the World — Fate of the People. The New Doctrine of War: Naval Battles Recur Every 317 Years or in Multiples Thereof, for Velimir Chlebnikov." This in turn referenced one of Chlebnikov's somewhat fantastic mystical theories, which posited that every 317 years a climactic naval conflict occurs to fundamentally alter the path of humankind.

The outlines of military vehicles recurrently poke through the meshed mass of coiled vines that writhe viscerally across the entire picture plane. Akin to so much of Kiefer's significant output, this work directly references the long shadow that conflict cast over the artist's formative upbringing in 1950s Germany. What Kiefer here portrays as simplistic and naïve silhouettes behind the tangled branches are really representations for wanton death and catastrophe. The dichotomy between the brutality and carnage of conflict and the face of its anaesthetised, even beautiful representation is thus set at the kernel of the work.

Kiefer aims to transform his extraordinary media into something of extreme metaphorical significance. This work thus evokes the transformative effect and alchemical potential that is inherent to and characteristic of his best work. Many of Kiefer's materials are enlisted in homage to his teacher, the iconic German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, who shattered precedent and forged groundbreaking sculpture by using similarly corporeal matter as media. In keeping with Kiefer's monumental subjects - German history, political extremism, spirituality, mythology, the occult – the present work bespeaks a desire to embrace the past, as something which must be understood to interpret the present.