Anselm Kiefer

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, I Hold All Indias in my Hand, December 1996 - February 1997
Venice, Museo Correr, Anselm Kiefer, June - November 1997, pp. 328-329, illustrated in color
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Palacio de Velázquez, Anselm Kiefer - El Viento, El Tiempo, El Silencio, 1998, p. 129, illustrated

Exhibited in the large retrospective dedicated to Anselm Kiefer on the occasion of the 1997 Venice Biennial, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus (The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees) is an imposing example of the artist’s mature style.

The Latin title of the painting is taken from an original motto used by the Rosacrucians, and alludes to the path and pilgrimage of a particular lifetime. The journey can be thorny, but the destination is sweet, like honey to the bees. The motto is generally interpreted as saying that "spiritual knowledge gives solace to souls," of whom bees are a venerable symbol.

Kiefer does not paint a literal representation of the title, but creates a freely evocative composition, focus on the figure of a man, probably asleep, placed at the center of a concentric labyrinth. Released from subjects related to the German recent past, Kiefer is free to dedicate his attention to the surface and the visual complexity of the canvas, injecting the painting with unrivalled power and expression, and creating a forceful vision. The viewer is ushered into a landscape of primal, intuitive energy, where his earthly palette and his use of dark, heavy, composite pigment oscillates between light and dark, performing a drama of organic colors and shapes.

Commenting on the Venice exhibition Germano Celant noticed that: "In these paintings language becomes physical, it produces a poetry of matter based on the network of signs that are corporeal and natural as well as symbolic and allegorical. Among them the analogy between the plants and the stars, between Van Gogh’s sunflower seeds and the artistic cosmos that depends on and finds identity in his sacrifice, confirm the acceptance of an unknown destiny." (Germano Celant, in Anselm Kiefer, Himmel-Erde, Exhibition Catalogue, Venezia, Museo Correr, June 15 – November 9, 1997, p. 19)