Anselm Kiefer: Berenice

Anselm Kiefer: Berenice
KIEFER, ANSELM
1945 Donaueschingen

Title: Berenice.
Date: 2002.
Technique: Paint and collage over black-and-white photography on
Measurement: 101.5 x 74.5cm.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.

Provenance:
- Yvon Lambert, Paris (adhesive label)
- Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (directly from the artist)

- High symbolic power through a diverse selection of materials
- His incorporation of mythological themes is always also an engagement with the German past
- Kiefer was honoured in 2023 with the Prize of the German National Foundation and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit with Star


History, myth and collective memory
Anselm Kiefer is one of the most influential artists of our time. Born in Donaueschingen in 1945, he has been developing a body of work since the 1970s that is known for its monumental paintings and installations and explores themes such as history, mythology and memory. Throughout his career, Kiefer has explored German history and culture, grappling with the complexities of national identity and the burden of the past. His works are characterised by a powerful materiality and deeply interwoven symbolism. Kiefer works with lead, ash, earth, hair or organic materials - materials that not only represent transformation and transience, but make them physically tangible. They often depict vast landscapes, architectural ruins and symbolic images that address themes such as destruction, rebirth and the passing of time.

‘Berenice’
The work ‘Berenice’ from 2002 unites the artist's poetic and archaic visual language in an exemplary way. A nocturnal sky with a surreal-looking structure reminiscent of a comb or a staircase rises above a scene of architectural ruins in cool grey-blue tones. Long, dark strands of hair emerge from it, lying freely across the picture field and traversing the pictorial space. The eponymous Berenice refers to the Hellenistic queen whose hair sacrifice was raised into the heavens as a constellation according to ancient tradition. Berenice or Berenice lived from around 270 to 221 BC and was the wife of the Egyptian king Ptolemy III. When he went to war in the 3rd Syrian War, she promised the goddess of love Aphrodite that she would sacrifice her magnificent hair if her husband returned home victorious and unharmed. Berenice's hair is the only one of today's constellations to be named after a historical figure. In the Hellenistic era, the constellation was named after the then pharaoh Berenice II in 245 BC by the astronomer Konon of Samos and the poet Kallimachos. Kiefer translates this mythical moment into a visual language in which sacrifice, transformation and memory merge. The materiality of the real hair lends the scene a peculiar liveliness and an almost intimate physicality that stands in stark contrast to the distanced landscape of ruins. Within Kiefer's oeuvre, ‘Berenice’ stands for a phase of intensive exploration of ancient myths as collective repositories of cultural identity. The combination of mythological narrative, architectural elements and organic material is characteristic of his works from the early 2000s.


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Explanations to the Catalogue

Anselm Kiefer
Germany
Neo-Expressionism
New History Painting
Contemporary Art
Post War
2000s
Framed
Abstract
Collage
Photograph and oil
Cityscape