KIEFER, ANSELM
1945 Donaueschingen

Title: Durchzug durch das rote Meer.
Date: 1983.
Technique: Photo collage on rolled lead.
Measurement: 103 x 212 cm.
Notation: Inscribed verso lower left: Welle des Ostens gen Westen. Here additionally dedicated.
Base: Iron frame.



Provenance:
- - Galerie Rackey, Bad Honnef

- Corporate Collection Germany (acquired from previous owner in 2013)


Exhibition:
- Ludwig Museum, Koblenz 2012



- One of Kiefer’s earliest works exploring Jewish culture

- The work unites Kiefer’s central motifs: myth, monumentality and material weight

- The works in the series 'Durchzug durch das rote Meer' are among the artist’s most sought-after early photographic works

- In 2023, Kiefer was awarded the prestigious German National Prize



The Storyteller of the Twentieth Century

Anselm Kiefer is regarded as one of the most widely discussed and multifaceted artists of the contemporary era, particularly through his contemporary history paintings. At the centre of his artistic practice lie myth and memory, which he understands not as static narratives, but as living repositories of collective experience. For Kiefer, myth constitutes an interweaving of the conscious and the unconscious—something embedded within every individual and accessible to all.

Anselm Kiefer was born on 8 March 1945 in Donaueschingen, at a moment in history that shaped both world events and collective memory as profoundly as few others in recent times. Especially in his early work, he engaged intensively with Germany’s National Socialist past, provoking widespread debate.

Kiefer’s art is intentionally unsettling. Rather than concealing historical atrocities out of shame, he confronts a cultural memory shaped equally by pain and by internalised images and symbols. Yet this confrontation often unfolds subtly, escaping the inattentive viewer. Only through sustained engagement can one begin to understand Kiefer’s work. Rather than demanding prior knowledge, the artist privileges the viewer’s own associations and experiences, allowing for multiple layers of interpretation.



Passage through the Red Sea

Created in 1983, the present work represents one of Kiefer’s earliest engagements with Jewish culture, a subject that became increasingly important following his first journeys to Israel in 1983 and 1984 and would profoundly shape his oeuvre.

Kiefer draws particularly upon the Old Testament story of the Exodus as a crucial source. In contrast to the traumatic events of more recent German history, the Exodus functions as a powerful symbol of Jewish triumph. Through the epochal departure from Egypt, the lives of the Jewish people changed irrevocably: an era of servitude and suffering was left behind in favour of a new age of liberation. Kiefer regards the idea of an archetypal exodus as fundamental to all humanity. It may also carry personal significance for the artist himself, who, though deeply burdened by the weight of history, finds in his visions of a new world a form of emancipation from the past. In the present photo-collage on rolled lead, a vast and seemingly emptied landscape panorama unfolds. The topography remains deliberately ambiguous, suspended between real landscape and metaphysical space. The title offers the viewer an interpretative key to the biblical motif. Within Jewish culture, it is among the central symbols of liberation and transformation, while simultaneously evoking existential experiences of liminality and passage. For Kiefer, religion constitutes one of the most compelling reservoirs of memory, capable of forging connections among people across national boundaries.

The artist’s manipulated black-and-white photograph positioned at the centre of the composition immediately draws the viewer’s attention. For this image, Kiefer modelled a sculptural form directly on the floor of his studio. Constructed from corrugated metal sheets, the sculptural arrangement was repeatedly documented by the artist through photography together with the surrounding studio floor.Through remarkably simple means, Kiefer succeeds in evoking the parted sea—here conceived as a vision of the “wave of the East moving westward.” He subsequently mounted photographic prints onto large lead sheets, set within heavy iron frames. Kiefer further treated the surfaces with water and acid, creating subtle variations across the image field.

The isolation of the monumental photograph within the worked lead surface generates a suggestive, almost Symbolist effect. In this way, the artist elevates the temporary sculptural intervention staged within the studio beyond photography into the realm of monumental image-making.

Over the course of several years during the 1980s, Kiefer repeatedly returned to the series Passage through the Red Sea (Durchzug durch das Rote Meer) (cf. fig. 1), works that today rank among his best-known achievements in photography.

The combination of large-scale black-and-white photography with the materiality of lead lends the present work an additional gravity. Since 1982, Kiefer had been fascinated by lead, a material traditionally associated with alchemy, Kabbalah, and medicine. It embodies transformation, preservation, and memory simultaneously, thereby becoming itself a bearer of myth. What unfolds before the viewer is not an image that can be read unambiguously, but rather a space of resonance. Kiefer neither presupposes specific knowledge nor offers definitive interpretations. It is precisely within this openness that the work derives its power: art functions as metaphor, unfolding its full potential only in dialogue with the viewer. Passage through the Red Sea thus becomes a place where personal perception and collective memory are inextricably intertwined.

Sophie Ballermann



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#Anselm Kiefer #Neo-Expressionism #New History Painting #Germany #Contemporary Art #1980s #Scultpures.



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