Anselm Kiefer

Galleria Lia Rumma, Napoli/Milan
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Museo d'Arte Moderna della Città di Lugano, Passioni d'arte: da Picasso a Warhol, September - December 2002, pp. 294-295
Turin, Castello di Rivoli - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, 2004 - 2005
Spain, Guggenheim Bilbao, Anselm Kiefer, March - September 2007, cat. no. 136, p. 330, illustrated in color
Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2007 - 2014

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. The sculpture shows signs of plaster and paint loss around the bottom edge, where it comes in contact with the floor.
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"As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It’s not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can’t come out in any other way, then the other things – the skill and technique – will follow." Anselm Kiefer

Besides paintings, sculptures and installations, often over-sized and site-specific, are a highly important part of Kiefer’s artistic practice. Paete is one of numerous striking life-sized sculptures of figures in dresses that the artist created at a later stage in his artistic career. These sculptures are characterized by naturalistic contours of a female body shrouded in long, elegant dresses. In place of heads, Kiefer has used a variety of materials and symbolic attributes to identify each woman, with paraphernalia ranging from books to lamps, bird cages, film reels, tree branches as well as barbed wire, as exemplified by the present work. In this body of works, each attribute signifies some aspect or history associated with the woman in question; the focus on material and history are iconic of artist’s oeuvre, and plays into a larger concern with social politics that so often characterizes Kiefer’s art.

The particular series of sculptures in which Paete belongs is highly significant because they address the persecution of women that has been rampant throughout history. The subjects of these sculptures are all intellectual women from antiquity, each identified by their names through the titles, who have been persecuted and executed for intellectual pursuits: notable examples include Hypatia, a gifted mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, Myrtis, a Greek poet, and Candidia, a Roman mystic who wove serpents through her hair. These women from classical mythology not only represent the ideal traits of strength, individualism and independence and transgressed the boundaries of their times, they are perfect examples of the unfair treatment handed out to women in society in both mythologies and reality. Kiefer was a student of Joseph Beuys for a period of time, and as a result his works are often laden with symbolism and historical, mythological and mystical references much like the works of Beuys.