Lilith am roten Meer translates to ‘Lilith on the Red Sea’. The biblical figure of Lilith has long been of interest to Anselm Kiefer, who first made paintings using her likeness and name in the 1980s and 1990s. In Hebrew folklore, Lilith was Adam’s first wife who, in one of the tellings, refused to go with him to the garden of Eden and live subservient to him; she chose to live by the Red Sea. She is frequently depicted as demonic, a warning and temptation to men with a mane of long, flowing hair. She is sometimes the matriarch of a host of demons, an alternative figure to the mother of the human race, Eve, representing destruction and chaos.

In a large painting by Kiefer held at the Tate, Lilith presides over a destructive, almost apocalyptic city scene of São Paulo, burned and ashen in Kiefer’s signature style, which he visited at the West German representative during the 19th São Paulo Biennial. He was reportedly overwhelmed by the sprawling city and would spend several days photographing it, which he then used as the basis for several paintings. He would later say that he ‘thought of … Lilith, who lives in the abandoned ruins. And I asked myself: what does this city say to me? And I thought of the end of the city, its dispersal into ashes, on the circular movement of all time’ (‘Betram Müller, Menschen noch nicht reif für Atomenergie: Künstler Anselm Kiefer im Interview’, Rheinische Post, 8 October 2011).

Here, we see Lilith through a softer gaze, hand covering her mouth as she looks away from the viewer. She is on the Red Sea: she is freed from Adam and the Garden, living in her self-imposed exile. In a similar work from the same period, Lilith reclines, arms covering her chest. These depictions of her, nude and vulnerable, flip the imposed narratives of destruction and instead render her human, warm, and even as a lover. Here, however, given Kiefer’s long grappling with the dark figure of Lilith, she poses a danger as a temptress, a siren singing from the shores to lure us onto the rocks, not to be trusted.

Kiefer is one of the world’s most celebrated living artists, renowned for his immense, immersive artworks excavating literature, memory, trauma, and philosophy. He is known for his torturous composition and unusual materials, incorporating trees, concrete, burned books, and lead, and into his installations and paintings. His work is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and Tate Modern among many others.