Anselm Kiefer

(Donaueschingen, Germania, 1945 – )

Invited by Giuliano Gori, Anselm Kiefer arrived at Fattoria di Celle in 2006, marking the beginning of discussions to create an installation in an as-yet-unidentified indoor space. Among the various available spaces, Giuliano Gori showed the artist around the Cascina Terrarossa with its very large hayloft with a small room at the top of the stairs.

The components of the works destined for Cascina hayloft were created in the artist’s studio in Barjac (France) and transported to the site on April 4, 2009. In preparation for unloading the massive crates, Giuliano Gori had two sets of scaffolding built, one indoors and one outside, ready to pass the enormous containers through the high window spaces once the glass was removed for the occasion. The artist carefully oversaw the assembly of the large paintings, hanging almost six meters tall and composed of a wealth of different techniquesapplied to jute (lower painting surface) and lead (upper painting surface), even suggesting material cuts. Finally, with the help of a chair, he climbed higher against the wall to write, by hand in charcoal, the title *Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles.*

In the second small room, the focus is on organizing the sculptural intervention on the floor;it consists of a stack of lead books forming a column, where the remains of a broken terracotta jar, serves as a capital. Pieces of the jar, like fragments of its body, are scattered across the room’s floor under the words, hand-written in charcoal, on the wall: *Shevirah ha-kelim*, meaning “the breaking of vessels.” One year later the artist returned to Pistoia, at the invitation of the CARIPT Foundation, to install the monumental work titled *Die Grosse Fracht* (The Great Load) on the vast wall of the reading roomin the San Giorgio Municipal Library. In 2019, on the occasion of Pistoia as the Italian Capital of Culture, Giuliano Gori promoted the exhibition of artist books and works, *Anselm Kiefer. Librifrailibri*, held in the same San Giorgio Library reading room.

“I visited Fattoria di Celle with Lia Rumma for the first time in the spring of 2006, invited by Giuliano Gori. What struck me immediately was that forest, the artworks as part of nature, the history evoked by the land. History, for me, is material. In my works, I use events, recurrences, places, the lives of those who worked and lived there; I am not interested in technique. I use substances and materials. By material, I mean both history and lead, painting, iron, or clay. The rooms of *Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles* were formed between Celle and Barjac, in the meeting of people, stories, and territories. They could not have existed anywhere else.” — Anselm Kiefer in *Anselm Kiefer. Cetteobscureclarté qui tombe des étoiles*, Gli Ori, Pistoia, 2009, p.13.

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Works by the artist

Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des toiles

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