Throughout his prolific career Anselm Kiefer has unflinchingly explored the deeply traumatic cultural legacy inherited by artists in post-war Germany. From his appearance at the 1980 Venice Biennale he has interpreted the great political and cultural concerns at the heart of modern European sensibility through a diverse range of medium. Exhibitions of his photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings and installations have been extensively staged and his work is included in a number of the world’s most prestigious public and private collections.
Kiefer represents one of the most prominent figures in the Neo-Expressionist art movement, which emerged in the late 1970s as a reaction against Conceptual art and Minimalism. Neo -Expressionists such as Markus Lupertz and Georg Baselitz sought to revive gestural techniques and experimentation with materials in the tradition of the American Abstract Expressionists, but rejected the idea of painting “about nothing”. Born as they were during the dark aftermath of historical catastrophe, when post-war Germany and Italy stood utterly defeated, these artists would come to portray the bitterness and angst they felt through emotionally fraught images that are rooted in collective memory, literature and expressionistic art.

During the late 1980's, a transitional period in his career, Kiefer became ever more concerned with allegorical subject matter beyond Germany; religious traditions and the symbolism of different cultures. The title of this particular work refers to the ancient city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC. Specifically, it refers to the great library in Alexandria, a major repository of ancient scholarship; having been demolished by fire it has subsequently become a symbol for the destruction of cultural and universal memory.

The weighty, pervasive themes of his artistic production are reflected in the monumental size of much of his work, such as in this lot, the scale of which is such that it engulfs the viewer’s field of vision. Alexandria acquires an intense physical presence by means of the heavy, distressed textures created by the unusual use of medium, which relates to the artist’s fundamental interest in alchemy and the natural elements. The limited, dense colour palette of black, white and shades of tarnished metal, strengthens the overwhelming impact on the viewer and immediate sense of despair. Although highly inventive, the artist is deeply aware of his relation to his contemporaries and predecessors alike; his technical inventiveness calls to mind the experimentation of French graffiti artist Jean Dubuffet and the ambiguity of Arte Povera, the Italian Minimalist movement of the 1960's.

Kiefer firmly rejects the obscurity and detachment often associated with modern art, “painting, for me, is not just about creating an illusion. I don’t paint to present an image of something. I paint only when I have received an apparition, a shock, when I want to ‘transform’ something. Something that possesses me, and from which I have to deliver myself…"(North Adams, Press Release: Anselm Kiefer, Mass MOCA, 20 October 2007) Alexandria, a horrifying vision of destruction, is at once overwhelming, disturbing and deeply ambiguous. “Art is difficult,” Kiefer insists, “it is not entertainment.” (Alex Needham, Anselm Kiefer: Art is difficult..., The Guardian, 9 December 2011)