Les Femmes de l’Antiquité

Material

Steel, plaster and paint on fibreglass; 195 x 135 x 135 cm

Dating

1999

About the artwork

During the 1990s, Anselm Kiefer travelled the world, visiting countries like Israel, Egypt, Brazil, Central America, Australia and India. He felt especially drawn to places of antiquity which were shrouded in myths. These myths and legends helped to shape his work over the next years and pushed it into a new direction. During his extensive travels Kiefer studied ancient cultures and collected materials such as plants, grasses and antique tableware, which he incorporated into his works.
The series ‘The Women of Antiquity’, which consists of paintings and sculptures, was inspired by this particular interest in mystical antiquity. Kiefer’s ambition regarding this series was to commemorate ancient and mythical, female figures, whose place in history has been neglected for too long. Some of his creations depict demoniac, mysterious creatures such as Pandora or Lilith, others represent Greek philosophers or poetesses. What they all have in common, is that they challenged the, at that time, prevalent conventions and power structures. Hence, they were labelled as fractious and intractable.
His up to 2 metre high sculptures, are made of white or blue bridelike dresses, which Kiefer installed on a rack, applying fibre glass and plaster. Each figure has been designed individually and contains a reference to a specific woman, which Kiefer wanted to honour. The alternating and therefore pivotal element of every sculpture is the head, i.e. the symbolic material which was used to construct the head. Kiefer stated: “The women do not have a head, because the history of women from the last three millennia was only made known through men. But poetesses such as Sappho or Telesilla, we are now aware of only through the citations of male poets who are better known. That is the explanation: without a head, because they were defined by others."
The sculpture shown here probably depicts one of the three Erynies, female deities of vengeance in Greek mythology. They lived in the underworld and were described as old, but virginal hags, dressed in grey robes. Their smell was unbearable, poisonous spittle was running from their eyes and they have living snakes in place of hair. Kiefer’s use of razor wire as the sculptures head is a clear hint at the snakes. But the Erynies, as evil as they seem, were also worshipped and considered advocates of matriarchal principles. Thereby the sculpture contributes to Kiefer’s ambition to dignify history’s forgotten female figures and to assure their place in history. Hence, ‘The Women of Antiquity’ are perfectly in line with his oeuvre, which has always dealt with history, identity, mythology, literature and art.

About the artist

The German artist Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen in 1945 and has been working and living in France since 1993. His oeuvre undoubtedly belongs to the most arresting occurrences in contemporary art.
The trajectory of Kiefer’s work shows how it retraces the marks of human history in a labyrinthine, polymorphic but coherent way. Kiefer uses the most diverse image media: photography, gouache, watercolour, painting, sculpture, installation and the book. Likewise the sources of inspiration are multiple: antique mythology, Nordic culture, Jewish mysticism and Kabbala, cosmology, alchemy, modern technologies and much more. While using various techniques, lead has become the characteristic and ponderous material in Kiefer’s oeuvre. Kiefer’s main theme is memory, in as much as memory charges remembrance. In his early work, memory work was determined by the question of how one could continue to be a ‘German’ artist after the Holocaust and the usurpation of the national cultural and artistic tradition by National Socialism. Kiefer mourned this manipulated tradition. In the early 1980s the artist broadened his thematic fabric: the loss of meaning and the impossibility of accessing it became key themes. And finally, it is the myths of various cultures – the Jewish-Christian, the Egyptian, the Oriental as much as the Germanic and Nordic ones – that attract him and enter is work in peculiar ways. Kiefer’s interest in mythical narrations, ‘pre-scientific’ cosmologies and mysteries, aims at exploring the relationship between the human microcosm and the macrocosm of the universe, the creation of the world and the order that precedes and changes with it.