Gagosian Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the🔯 present owner

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Anselm Kiefer, Next Year in Jerusalem, 2010, p. 75, illustrated in colour and 🃏p.77, illustrated 🐼in colour in detail

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Anselm Kiefer's monumental Thora is steeped in an archaeological wealth of mystical, religious and mythological allusion. Solemnly isolated in a vitrine of glass and steel, a chair buckles under the leaden weight of a contorted typewriter, out of which spring aluminium sunflowers crowned with concentric Fibonacci spirals of seeds. This assemblage of calcified and oxidised metal objects are emblematically anchored to the inscribed rubric, Thora, hovering above. Contained within an empty yet symbolically meditative bou𒁃ndary, Kiefer's sculptural tableau comprises a magnificent inquiry into the dichotomous intꦛerrelation of Wagnerian myth and Judaic scripture and mysticism allied through the German language.

An extrapolation of Thor, the Norse god of strength and thunder, Thora is the legendary Viking daughter of Herraud, Earl of Gottaland and King of Sweden. As documented by Scandanavian myth, Thora's father presented her with a small lindworm that grew into an encircling, protective and venomous serpent; Herraud pledged that any suitor who dared slay the serpent would be worthy of his daughter's hand. Although this feat was achieved by Ragnar Lodbrok, Thora died before the wedding and Ragnar later married Aslaug, the daughter of Sigurd and Brynhild, protagonists of the German epic poem Nibelungenlied and Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Ostensibly divergent to the evocation of Wagnerian myth, Thora also translates in German as the word for the Judaic Torah, the primary holy scripture of the Jewish faith. This scroll contains the first five books of the Bible revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai, and represents the essential instruction and principle teachings of Judaism. According to Medieval Judaic mysticism, each Hebrew letter of the Torah reflects a spiritual as well as linguistic order. Indeed, as alluded to by Kiefer's inscription'der fehlende Buchstabe', within the Kabbalist text 'Sefer ha Te♏munah', the revelation of 'the missing letter' is prophesised to herald the movement of the world to another metaphysical realm ✅and inaugurate the repair of the universe.

Herein, Kiefer binds mutual exclusivity, overturns myth and upends religion in his powerful symbolic vernacular. Out of the rubble of Kiefer's reliquary-like encasement, Thora signals the dissolution of boundaries, the possibility of transgression, to invoke an encompassing connection between language and the cosmos. Articulated in Kiefer's signature material, lead, Thora is an enigmatic anti-monument, an alchemical polyphony of 🦄the historical and mythological that contr🎐adicts, challenges and destabilises to forge regeneration from the ruins.