Anselm Kiefer German, b. 1945
"Kiefer is a monument in the landscape of contemporary art — a painter who has confronted the weight of history, myth, and memory with a scale and seriousness that few can rival."
Anselm Kiefer (born 1945) is a German painter and sculptor widely regarded as one of the most important and monumental artists of the post-war era. His vast canvases and sculptural installations confront German history, Jewish mysticism, Norse mythology, and the poetry of Paul Celan with materials — lead, straw, sand, ash, burned books, molten glass — that carry the weight of their own symbolic charge. Represented by Gagosian and White Cube, his work is held at the Tate Modern, MoMA, the Louvre, and major collections worldwide.
"Every painting is a voyage into a sacred country. I like to think of my brushstrokes as footprints in the sand."
Anselm Kiefer was born on 8 March 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, in the final weeks of the Second World War. He studied law and romance languages before enrolling at the Kunstakademie Freiburg and later the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Düsseldorf, where he was taught by Joseph Beuys from 1970 to 1972.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Kiefer became controversial for a series of photographs and actions in which he depicted himself performing the Nazi salute in various locations across Europe — works intended not as celebration but as a provocation to confront a history Germany was still struggling to acknowledge. These early provocations established the twin poles of his career: vast ambition and unflinching engagement with the most painful chapters of German and European history.
His mature paintings are among the most physically imposing works in contemporary art. Working on canvases of monumental scale, he applies paint with sand, straw, lead, ash, shellac, and other materials to create surfaces of extraordinary density and texture. Subjects range from the Nibelungenlied and Wagner to the Holocaust (via Paul Celan's "Todesfuge"), Kabbalah, alchemy, and the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann.
Kiefer has lived and worked in France since 1992, first in Barjac (where he built a vast artistic estate over twenty years) and then in Paris. He was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2008 and the Praemium Imperiale in 1999. His works are held at Tate Modern, MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre, and virtually every major museum in the world.
Major exhibitions: Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1984 & 2015); Guggenheim Museum, New York (1988); Grand Palais, Paris (2007); Louvre, Paris (2007).
Works in public collections: Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Louvre, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Art Institute of Chicago.
Selected bibliography: Matthew Biro, Anselm Kiefer, Phaidon, 2013; Mark Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, Prestel, 1987; Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer, Thames & Hudson, 2001.