Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art

b. 1945, Donaueschingen, Germany

Anselm Kiefer belongs among the German artists who have played an important role in the development of German post-war art at both national and international levels. Kiefer's point of departure is conceptualistic with ingredients of performance art and happenings, influenced by Joseph Beuys' art and his probings into the dialogue between art and life as well as his particular way of relating to various materials. Kiefer often works in series of pictures, each with its own independent theme, yet related by specific subjects and symbols which are repeated and joined together to form expanded fields of meaning. Kiefer is particularly occupied by a tension that is created in the interplay of mythology and history. Archetypal landscapes and architecture laden with significance invoke associations built on the existential experiences of the individual viewer.

From 1969 until 1980, Kiefer's work is focused upon German history and tradition as well as on his own vocation as an artist. Content plays the leading role during this period and makes a daring contribution to the German people's dawning understanding of their own recent history. 'Dem unbekannten Maler' is an image of "Ehrenhof" (Hall of Glory) in the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Adolf Hitler's leading architect Albert Speer (1905--1981) in honour of the unknown soldier. In the middle of all the sarcofagi in this memorial hall a palette is raised high, and seems almost like a lightning rod thrusting towards a threatening sky. The palette is there as the artist's weapon, the symbol of his heroic struggle. He is a man of action who, like the soldier, fights for his ideals. Here and in other paintings Kiefer changes the function of dreary Fascist architecture into spaces that lose their intended meaning when deserted by their original adherents; these he transforms into optimistic monuments for the artist and his liberating task.

In the 1980s and 1990s it is the physical surface of the image and its visual complexity that comes to the fore. An almost confusing quantity of such materials as lead, straw, ashes, hair, pottery shards, sand, clay and concrete objects is taken into use. Kiefer's themes fuse with the enormous formats of American Abstract Expressionism as well as with Modernism's insistance upon the artwork's physical qualities. Kiefer's work is marked by an ambiguity in which good and evil exist side by side and many interpretations are possible. The objective is to create a metahistory in which Wagner's Armageddon, World War II, the Holocaust, theology, Jewish metaphysics, alchemy and concepts of universal unity are combined in striking physical images and installations. They are so filled with traces and remnants that they are experienced as a continuous process, a form of "performance". Kiefer's work generally functions on two levels: first of all spontaneously through its expressively charged monumentality and secondly by the way in which it invites a perceptive richness of associations.

The thematic, material and procedural aspects of Kiefer's work are amalgamated in the sculpture 'Zweistromland' or 'The High Priestess'. With his basis in Conceptualism, Kiefer, from the very beginning of his career, has been occupied by books, and it is there specific materials such as sand and clay enter into his art. Books continue to be the recurring theme and experimental arena for the most dissimilar subject matter. At the end of the 1980s they are collected on huge steel shelves creating an entire library, which in principle could be supplemented and continued indefinitely.

Our sculpture consists of about 200 massive lead books, seemingly untidily arranged in two enormous steel book shelves, slanted at an angle toward each other and divided in the middle by a heavy glass plate. Although the books weigh 300 kilos each, just as real books, they can be taken off the shelves and "read".

The work's titillating ambiguity is magnified by its dual German-English title. 'Zweistromland', the land between two rivers creates associations with antiquity's Mesopotamia. The rivers Tigris and Euphrates are clearly designated by inscriptions on each side of the shelves and are present metaphorically in the form of two test tubes filled with water. The gigantic book shelves prompt immediate thoughts of the legendary library in Babylon with its huge stores of collected knowledge. Mesopotamia stands as the cradle of culture, an abundant Garden of Eden where the waters of the rivers ensured fertile land and an irrigation system an even distribution and access to water. Water, however, can also be destructive, cause flood disasters and destroy the land.

The title 'The High Priestess' refers to a female figure on a Tarot card. She is the high priestess shown holding out a book. She is the personification of wisdom, just as a book collection can be a metaphor for stored knowledge. Her knowledge is a hidden, mystical and mythical form of knowledge, not measurable, but intuitive, built on ancient wisdom.

Thus, a broad spectrum of intellectual knowledge, fantasy, myths and tangible objects are collected in the books. Most of them contain manipulated photographs of the world's surface. Others preserve organic matter, such as clay, peas, hair, straw and suchlike -- everything that forms the basis for life. But not all the books contain something. Approximately half of them are "empty", and these show traces of erosion, foot and wheel prints, impressions and scrape marks etc. The march of time and life's accidental character are a part of the whole.

The books are lead containers in which testimonials of our previous history and the preconditions of our lives are stored. But lead is a two-sided metal; it is soft and pliable while simultaneously poisonous and dangerous, both threatening and protective. It suggests associations with alchemy and the relationship between alchemist and artist: one attempts to turn lead into gold while the other tries to convert everyday things in order to give the viewer deeper insight. Lead and steel give an impression of isolation and difficult accessibility. The weight and size of the books emphasize that it is not easy to grasp or to use their content. We are faced with a "high priestess" in a supernatural form, pregnant with a corresponding wisdom, and the wings of the book shelves - a wide-open book - are like the mythical figure's open arms seeking to embrace us.