Aaron

Although Kiefer does not see himself as a landscape painter, landscape is indeed the basis of a great part of his art. It is a central motif of his work when he addresses recent German history and also when he refers to the Hebrew Bible and the Kabbalah. Only after his trips to Israel in 1984 in conjunction with his solo exhibition at the Israel Museum did Kiefer take the story of the Exodus from Egypt, and later the mystical corpus of the Kabbalah, as prime sources for his work. He envisioned the Exodus as a powerful metaphor for the liberation of all people, concentrating not on Moses, but on Aaron, who as creator of the Golden Calf may be considered an artist. Kiefer might even identify with Aaron's ambiguous personality. During his time in Israel, Kiefer was particularly attracted by the Judean Desert's barrenness and stillness, with all its historical overtones and spirituality. Aaron echoes both the Judean hills and his earlier archetypal landscapes with earth and heaven as their protagonists: dark plowed fields and sky pushed almost out of the picture, which he derived from the neighboring fields of his studio in Buchen, Germany. A lead "staff of Aaron" is the central element of the painting. It reminds us of Joseph Beuys's "Eurasian staff," an object with which Beuys hoped to forge a link between Eastern transcendence and Western materialism. Kiefer was no doubt aware of it; nevertheless, his use of lead is related to his attraction to alchemy. The physical materiality of the surface, enriched by mud and straw, and the vast scale of the painting give it a forceful presence.