White Cube, London
Private Collection, Berlin
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the illustration fails to fully convey the sculptural quality of the surface. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition.
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"Angels, archangels, seraphim, cherubim... more important was the concept that the spiritual realm is a spiral going up and down. So the spiritual realm is moving and twisting. This is important to the way I organize my pictures. I work with the concept that nothing is fixed in place and that symbols move in all directions. They change hierarchies depending on the context"
The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Fort Worth, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, 2005, p. 172

Anselm Kiefer's oeuvre seeks a new visual world for the grand narrative of history painting in the post-war era. In commanding a dense wealth of political and cultural referents, Kiefer archetypally institutes a densely esoteric mise-en-scene that negotiates a vast landscape of time and space. Executed in 2007, Die Ordnung der Engel (The Hierarchy of Angels) is a consummate example of Kiefer's elegiac dialectic between mythology, history and his native Germany's collective memory. In pursuing this project of symbolic interlacement, a distinctly melancholic response to recent historical trauma is conferred: for Kiefer, to move forward one has to look back. Many of the artist's early works from the 1980s polemically dealt with a host of themes directly associated with the Third Reich. While this tenet reverberates today in Kiefer's contemporary praxis, the mature works increasingly cast a broader, more totalising cultural arc that searches for universal truths. Within the monolithic Die Ordnung der Engel, Kiefer masterfully mediates between these two strands: the artist-alchemist wields fire to poetically connect and transmute the universal and the specific, microcosm and macrocosm. Typically Kiefer has dealt with the elements of earth, fire and water extensively; however this work brings the fourth element to the frontline. Upon the cracked strata of Kiefer's surface, suspended and scorched dresses numbered 1-9 simultaneously allude to Christian, Jewish and Islamic myth, whilst proffering an allusion to Germany's Nazi past. Moreover, two of Kiefer's thematic cycles are combined in the present work: in the artist's lexicon the recurrent dress motif is associated to works centred on the figure of Lilith in Jewish folklore, whilst the title stems from the eponymous series of works initiated in 1983, examples of which can be found in The Arts Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Centre Minneapolis and Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona. In representing a unique conflation of these themes, Kiefer's Die Ordnung der Engel implores the viewer t⛦o deconstruct🔯 and unravel a complex yet poetic strata of arcane allusion.

Literally inscribed at the topmost perimeter of the work, the title refers to an aspect of gnostic lore present in many religious mythologies, particularly prominent within early Christianity and Jewish mysticism. According to a 5^th Century text by Dionysius the Areopagite, 'The Celestial Hierarchy' comprises nine categories, or choirs, of angels charged with the duty of protecting the throne of God. Within the nine choirs three hierarchies navigate and preside over the space between heaven and earth: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Here listed in descending order of closeness to God, these ranking positions are redolent within Kiefer's painting. Dominating the surface of Kiefer's Die Ordnung der Engel, the nine classifications are symbolically represented by an equivalent number of tiny white dresses scattered in a surging, spiral formation rising atmospherically upwards. Here Kiefer takes on Dionysius's key concept of the spiritual realm as a vast spiral in which time and space move in all directions. Located between the scorched earth and the firmament, Kiefer directly associates these nine garments with the nine celestial messengers of God. However, rather than appearing deific in mediating between the earthly and the divine, Kiefer's entities are sullied and ash-covered. Smote within a cauterised troposphere they embody the abandoned and forsaken vestiges of a godless universe forever caught in limbo. Nonetheless, as is typical with Kiefer's vernacular, such a reading of despair is weighted by a correspondent sense of hope. As identified by Mark Rosenthal in his discussion of this cycle of works, Dionysius's archaic text prophesises that the heavenly hierarchy is only made visible to man via the appearance of the "Divine Ray", which upon emanating onto the world restores man to a higher spiritual condition (Mark Rosenthal in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Anselm Kiefer, 1987, p. 138).

This transformative mythic reading in turn accompanies Kiefer's destructive employment of fire in its simultaneous promise of healing and re-birth. Taking on the persona of the artist-alchemist, Kiefer scorches the terrain of his paintings to incite new meaning; having caused it to suffer, significance is restored. As redolent within Die Ordnung der Engel's cracked matière, cauterised palette and leaden weight, Kiefer's longstanding employment of alchemically symbolic process and material is markedly prescient. However, Kiefer is acutely mindful of, and even identifies with, the alchemist's traditional reputation as a morally ambiguous figure with links to the devil. In wielding such Faustian allusions Kiefer knowingly skirts the peripheries between good and evil; occasionally playing the part of Devil's advocate, Kiefer drives forth p🦂rovocative subject matter as a means to acknowledge historical trauma.

Singed and blackened, Kiefer's choir of angels preside over the fractured ruins of some eviscerated location, their small vestments symbolising the lost victims of an unnamed catastrophe, and even perhaps the Holocaust itself. Belonging to the generation of artists to emerge in the economically prosperous West Germany after World War II, Kiefer was of the first to directly confront the sacrifices and national taboos of Germany's Nazi past. The Nazi agenda of burning as a means of racial purification is unmistakably present within Kiefer's complex semiotic layering. What's more, and in line with the aforementioned museum examples that share the same title, the atmospheric dimension of the present work and dominion of🅷 air-borne entities casts an allusion to Hitler's tyrannical agenda of air supremacy during the War. In keeping with the densely metaphorical and loaded symbolism inherent to Kiefer's practice, this work continues to bridge the gap between ancient mythology and recent German history; much of Kiefer's production incites a dialogue that aims to come to terms with Germany's Nazi past. Within the subdued colour palette of earth tones, greys and abyssal blacks Kiefer expresses a melancholic monument to lives🎐 lost and the devastation brought upon Jewish culture.

Herein the metaphoric invocation of the legendary Jewish figure of Lilith is markedly present in Kiefer's Die Ordnung der Engel. Embodying a sustained interest, Lilith is symbolically recurrent throughout Kiefer's oeuvre most often indicated in the form of a childlike dress or smock. According to Judaic myth, Lilith was the first wife of Man, borne from the same earth as Adam as opposed to Eve who sprung from his rib. Reputed to be a demon of the night, the rebellious Lilith was cast from God's fold for demanding equality with Adam. Operating in the impure realm between the mortal and the divine, Lilith purportedly navigated the firmament in search of infants to kidnap, while in some strands of the myth Lilith bore hundreds of demon progeny. Interestingly, according to the kabbalah, Lilith, like lead, is associated with the melancholy attributed to the planet of Saturn. Akin to Saturn, the mythological figure who infamously devoured his children, Lilith is also associated with the dull and leaden moroseness of the melancholic temperament. Moreover, as outlined by Michael Aupig; "those with a melancholic character, a disposition often associated with artists, are called 'Lilith's sons'" (Exhibition Catalogue, Fort Worth, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, 𝔉2005, p. 10🍰0). As a result, the tiny clothes here could be considered the children of Lilith, whilst also alluding to the artist as a melancholic agent of creation itself. 

Within the myriad strands of interconnection that constitute the present work, Kiefer embroils the viewer in a complex matrix of signifiers alchemically and morally balanced between good and evil. In esoterically dissolving such boundaries and hinting at the linkages between the deepest reaches of mythology to the most sensitive of collective traumas, Kiefer's Die Ordnung der Engel is an atemporal and masterfully solemn response to sacrif🎀ice, suffering and los🎶s within our modern age.