Anselm Kiefer: The Complete Story
A painting the size of a wall, so thick with ash, straw, lead and dried mud that it seems to be crumbling back into earth. Standing before an Anselm Kiefer is less like looking at a picture than at a scorched field or a ruined building.
He makes art out of German history and its darkest memories.
He is a German artist famous for vast, heavily textured works that confront the legacy of Nazism, war and myth, built from paint mixed with raw materials.
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Painting with the earth
Kiefer loads his surfaces with straw, ash, clay, lead, dried flowers and broken glass, so the works are almost reliefs, cracked and three dimensional.
This extreme version of impasto makes each picture feel like a landscape that has survived a fire, heavy with time and ruin.
Facing the German past
As a young artist Kiefer did something shocking: he photographed himself giving the Nazi salute at historic sites, forcing his country to look at the past it wanted to bury.
Ever since, his work has been a form of history painting about guilt and memory, refusing the silence of postwar Germany.
Myth, ruins and the sky
Kiefer fills his work with German myth, poetry and ruined architecture, vast empty halls and burned fields, often inscribed with names and words.
He has turned to the stars and ancient texts too, linking the smallest human cruelty to the scale of the cosmos, so that history and eternity sit in the same frame.
The artist as builder
Kiefer works on an enormous scale, occupying former factories and a huge estate in the south of France where he built towers, tunnels and whole landscapes of art.
He treats the studio itself as a work, a private world of lead books, sunflowers and crumbling structures that visitors can walk through.
Common questions about Anselm Kiefer
What is he known for?
Huge textured paintings about German history, war and myth.
What are his works made of?
Paint mixed with straw, ash, lead, clay and other raw materials.
Why the Nazi salute photos?
To force Germany to confront a past it preferred to ignore.
Where is he from?
Born in Germany in 1945, in the last months of the war.
Why the ruined surfaces matter
Kiefer made memory physical, turning guilt and history into something you can almost smell, cracked and ashen on the wall. Born in the rubble of 1945, he spent his life refusing to let his country forget, and his burned fields remain among the most serious reckonings any artist has made with the twentieth century.
His lead books, huge volumes with pages of buckled metal, are among his strangest creations, libraries that can never be read, and one of his estates in France has become a sprawling private art city that he has begun opening to the public.
He was also chosen to make the first new permanent work installed in the Louvre by a living artist in decades, a measure of how completely the once provocative young German entered the canon.
He has filled aircraft hangars and underground vaults with his work, treating whole buildings as canvases, and his shows routinely require special engineering just to hang the enormous, heavy panels.
Critics once accused the young Kiefer of flirting with the very symbols he depicted, before the world understood he was forcing a reckoning, not a revival.
His works hang in the world greatest museums and sell for many millions, making the difficult subject of German guilt one of the most valued themes in contemporary art.