Lot 624 D

The work “Aaron” iconographically refers to the Old Testament narrative of the so-called miracle of the rod from the second book of Moses. The narrative states that Aaron, Moses' brother, was chosen to be a priest by God on Mount Sinai after the staffs of the representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel had been laid out one night on the ark of the covenant and Aaron's staff blossomed the next day as an almond branch. Anselm Kiefer takes up the figure of Aaron in several works. In this work he refrains from a figurative representation of events.
'Aaron, their presumptive subject, emerges pictorially only through Kiefer`s use of metonymic processes, namely the synecdochic inclusion of Aaron`s staff. Rendered either in a photographic cut-out or a thinly wrought leaden strip, each vaguely anthropomorphic in form, the staff, whose meaning in these pictures depends on the semantic field determined by the title, comes to function as the marker of the biblical iconophile, who is represented but not mimetically figured.” (Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and art after Auschwitz, Cambridge 1999, p.24 f.).