Anselm Kiefer

Making sense of the senseless

Permanent

Anselm Kiefer (Donaueschingen, Germany, 1945 – Paris, France, currently)

Born just months before the final European battle of World War II, Anselm Kiefer grew up witnessing the consequences of modern warfare and the division of his homeland. He experienced the rebuilding of a fragmented nation and its struggle for renewal. The artist dedicated himself to investigating the interwoven patterns of German mythology and history and the way they contributed to the rise of Fascism. Many of his paintings —immense landscapes and architectural interiors, often encrusted with sand and straw—invoke Germany’s literary and political heritage; references abound to the Song of the Nibelung, a German epic poem from the Middle Ages or to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). In one of his earliest projects, his 1969 Occupations (Besetzungen) series, Kiefer photographed himself mimicking the Nazi salute at various sites in France, Italy, and Switzerland. Following his move to southern France in the early 1990s, Kiefer’s iconography expanded to encompass more universal themes of civilization, culture, and spirituality, drawing upon such sources as alchemy, ancient myths, and the Kabbalah.

Kiefer became one of the foremost representatives of Neo-Expressionism, an approach characterized by violent, gestural brushwork. Bright color and strong light are not usually present in his works: images are cloudy, veiled, and show twilight scenes, painted with gray as the dominating color. His large-scale works combine a nearly monochromatic palette with mixed media, including materials such as ash, plaster, seeds, soil, straw, and strips of lead. Experimenting with materials is of great importance to Kiefer’s creative process. The chosen material acquires a symbolic meaning when understood in combination with the subject matter. The objects that are gathered in his works transcend their physical identities and speak for themselves, showing the artist’s obsessions through rich association and metaphors. Sand, flowers, dry branches, straw, and the iron objects all show Kiefer’s fascination with metamorphosis. Lead becomes a key material, both for its physical properties and great transformation capacity, as for its relationship with alchemy and the Kabbalah. (Guggenheim Museum Bilbao)

“For me, art is the only possibility to establish a connection between things that make no sense and those that have a meaning. I see history as something synchronized, both if it refers to the Sumerians or to German mythology. As far as I am concerned, old sagas are not old at all. Neither is the Bible. When you look into it, the majority of things have already been formulated.” (Anselm Kiefer quoted in Ein Gespräch: Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, Anselm Kiefer, Enzo Cucchi. Edited by Jacqueline Burckhardt. Ed. Parkett-Verlag, Zurich, 1986, p. 40)