Malerei als Drama. Anselms Kiefers Bühne für den Dialog

Abstract

It has frequently been pointed out that Paul Celan’s poems have a dialogic impulse. In this respect, Anselm Kiefer’s paintings can be considered the pictorial extension of Celan’s poetic structures. I will argue that with the inscriptions on his paintings, Kiefer exhibits dialogic moments, relating different perspectives to one another, thereby attempting to understand painting as drama; that is, to create a place for visual experience where no epic narrative is told, but an ongoing and dramatic conflict is acted out. This will be illustrated by a closer look of two of Kiefer’s paintings: The Sand from the Urns (for Ingeborg Bachmann, for , 1997) and The Sand from the Urns (for Paul Celan, 2009).