Anselm Kiefer, rare serigraph on paper

This extremely rare work on paper by Anselm Kiefer is the one and only silkscreen and signed edition on paper Anselm Kiefer ever made. Printed on a prestigious BKF Rives Paper (finest paper used by art publishers), this signed silkscreen is in perfect condition. It was made in 2000, on the occasion of a Paris exhibition untitled Shebirat Kelim (Chapelle de la Salpêtrière, 21th september - 5th november 2000). This serigraph represents one of the artist's most famous motifs : a pile of lead books with a boat on top. References to books, alchemy, mythologies and twentieth-century history are interwoven. Indeed, the boat is both a reference to the greek myth of the Argonauts and the World War II, while the lead books refer both to the use of lead by alchemists and to the Kabbalistic tradition. Lead is used in many of Anselm Kiefer's works. It is a material which fascinates him because it is associated with transmutation, with Saturn (God of agrarian fertility), with melancholy, with weight and also with ductility.

Born in 1945, Anselm Kiefer is one of the leading and most valuable artists of our time. After studying French, law and painting, he took classes with Joseph Beuys. With Gerhard Richter, Andreas Gursky, Georg Baselitz and Neo Rauch, he established himself as one of the artists capable of imposing a new German art on the international scene. He attributes mythology, books, history and nature as his main subjects and sources of inspiration. His works have been exhibited worldwide and are included in notable private and public collections, including the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; the Tate Modern, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Albertina, Vienna.