Anselm Kiefer

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London

Sammlung Ackermans, Kleve

Schönewald Fine Arts, Xanten

Private Collection, Germany

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2003 

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, I Hold All Indias in my Hand, 1996-97 

Venice, Museo Correr, Anselm Kiefer: Himmel – Erde, 1997, pp. 328-29, illustrated in colour 

Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; Palacio de Velázquez, Anselm Kiefer – El Viento, El Tiempo, El Silencio, 1998, p. 129, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum, Anselm Kiefer, 2007, p. 272, no. 108, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is much lighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Anselm Kiefer’s Dat Rosa Mel Apibus is one of the most important and impressive works from a decisive series created in the mid-1990s. These works juxtapose fossilised forms comprised of shellac and sunflower seeds with an image of a man lying at the centre and in doing so poses grand philosophical questions regarding man’s position in the universe. While the figure lying prostate in these works certainly bears resemblance to Kiefer himself and indeed is oft cited as a self-portrait, the man is usually identified as the sixteenth-century astrologer, cosmologist, philosopher, Occultist and Rosicrucian Robert Fludd (1574–1637). Today Fludd is famous for his belief in the concept that every plant grown on earth has its own equivalent star in the cosmos and that there is an intrinsic connection between the microcosm of the earth and macrocosm of the heavens. The present work’s title takes as its name the ancient Rosicrucian Latin dictum: ‘The Rose Gives Honey to the Bees’. Indeed, the heavily wrought and layered surface of Dat Rosa Mel Apibus stands as a metaphor for eternity – of both the fleeting nature of life and the unifying path the individual must make between heaven and earth. In this ambitious and erudite series Kiefer places man as the beating heart of the world and positions both around and within him allusions to the microcosmic and macrocosmic. Ever at the forefront of his mind, Kiefer returned to the subject in 2010-11 with a staggering, seventeen metre long piece whose title, Dat Rosa Miel Apibus is a variation of the present work. These paintings stand at the very apex of Kiefer’s artistic concerns and are held in some of the most important international collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Tate, London.

Robert Fludd's spiritual evolution, which journeyed through the doctrines of Christianity, the spirituality of Kabbalah and the alchemy of the Occultists, resulted in a prodigious outpouring of work from theories of evolution to scientific texts and mystical tracts. In a similar manner, Kiefer enriched and developed his own spiritual point of view through incorporating knowledge from other cultures, religions, philosophies and perhaps above all a fascination with alchemy. This journey finds its ultimate conclusion in the present work, which takes for its source Fludd’s Summum Bonum; an engraving of a sevenfold rose with the Latin words ‘Dat Rosa Mel Apibus’ written above.

Symbolised by the Rosy Cross or Rose Cross, Rosicrucianism was a clandestine philosophical sect founded by Christian Rosenkreuz in late Medieval Germany and was built on uncovering the cryptic truths of the ancient past which, lying dormant from the average man, provide acute understanding of both the physical world and the spiritual universe. The Rose Cross represents a labyrinth – the pilgrimage of an individual lifetime – whose journey to the centre can be thorny, but whose destination is succulent and sweet, like honey to a bee. The web like trajectory of this labyrinth is transformed in Dat Rosa Mel Apibus into a sevenfold concentric network of lines that emanate from the life giving nectar, the body of Robert Fludd and the secrets of Rosicrucianism, at the centre of the work. Projecting from his dormant body are jubilant effusions of sunflower seeds that here relate to the cosmos of stars, bringing the microcosmic and macrocosmic back into harmonious cyclical exchange.

As Daniel Arasse observes: "The images of Anselm Kiefer are inhabited, haunted by words, be they visible words, readable in his painting, or those that are invisible, either because they're buried under newer layers, or because, accompanying Kiefer throughout his work, they've been deposited, displaced, transformed until what is left to be seen are only those that will give their name, finally, to the work. This active presence of a verbal thought, at work in the work, manifests itself also by the themes (literary, historical or mythical) that Kiefer treats, and by the impressive dimension of his iconography, in the most classic meaning of the term, but made rigorously personal and up-to-date by his appropriation" (Daniel Arasse quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Anselm Kiefer: Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles, 1996, n.p.). Kiefer's endless fascination with the meanings of religious revelation, especially their mystical variants, is perhaps at its most clear in Dat Rosa Mel Apibus. This extraordinary piece reveals Kiefer as an artist who ultimately sought to depict the fragility of mankind's situation: his position on the terrestrial sphere and his celestial better.