Anselm Kiefer’s work approaches scripture the way one approaches a threshold: not as a door to be opened, but as an edge where the world trembles. His materials carry the heaviness of matter and the volatility of myth. Lead, ash, and straw are not symbols but forms of thinking, the residue of histories that never quite settle. In this series, Exodus becomes less a narrative of departure than a rehearsal of the elemental forces that draw humanity toward revelation, ruin, and return.

En Sof (2020–22) invokes the Kabbalistic name for the infinite, the unbounded origin that resists language. Kiefer translates this ineffable source into a ladder suspended in uncertainty. The rungs rise as if toward illumination, yet they appear brittle, almost dissolving into the surface. The ascent becomes a metaphysical wager: the desire to transcend measured against the fragility of the one who climbs. What emerges is not a path to God but a meditation on the distance between the finite and the infinite.

Wolkensäule (Column of Clouds) (2009–21) binds the ephemeral to the dense. The biblical pillar of cloud becomes a column of lead and pigment, heavy enough to rupture the idea of divine clarity. Revelation arrives here as opacity. Protection is bound to uncertainty. Kiefer suggests that the sacred often manifests not as illumination but as a disturbance in the field of vision, a darkened presence that both guides and withholds.

In Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them: they sank as lead (2020), the Red Sea narrative becomes an image of cyclical violence. A modern naval vessel hangs suspended over the scene, fusing ancient myth with contemporary warfare. The parted sea closes not only on Pharaoh’s army but on humanity’s recurring faith in force. Lead becomes the element through which history recognizes itself: heavy, mutable, always bearing the imprint of catastrophe.

Parabole turns the gaze inward toward the structure of meaning itself. A parable never declares its truth; it reveals through indirection. Kiefer’s layers, fractured and reconstituted, perform this logic. They suggest that understanding is always archaeological. Fragments do not point to a lost whole; they constitute the terrain of thought. Decay is not a failure of memory but its mode of survival.

Together, these works create a metaphysics of crossing. They dwell in the space between text and matter, between the world as it is and the world as it imagines itself. Kiefer shows that Exodus is not an event but a condition: the perpetual movement between destruction and renewal, between the silence of the infinite and the burdens of history. The search for meaning unfolds here not as resolution but as an ongoing passage through the limits of what can be seen, named, or endured.