Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer (Donaueschingen, 8 March 1945) is a German painter and sculptor associated with Neo-Expressionism, a current of postmodern art that emerged in the 1980s. He is one of the best-known post-war German artists and also one of the most controversial, since his work confronts taboo subjects of recent German history, above all Nazism.

He grew up in Rastatt and studied fine arts in Freiburg im Breisgau, in Karlsruhe with Horst Antes, and in Düsseldorf, where he was a student of Joseph Beuys. He also studied law and French. His first works, following Beuys, focused on installation and happening, and in the 1970s he turned to painting. In 1969 he presented his first solo exhibition in Karlsruhe, the series Occupations.

His style initially drew on Georg Baselitz, with thick layers of paint worked with fire or acids and combined with glass, wood or plant matter. His works merge painting, sculpture and photography through collage and assemblage, with violent brushwork and an almost monochrome palette. He uses materials such as bitumen, lead, wire, straw, plaster, clay, ash or plants, as well as waste and even military hardware, as in The Order of the Angels (1983) and Tomb in the Air (1986). In the 1970s he focused on German mythology and in the following decade on Kabbalah. Letters, abbreviations, personal names and places loaded with history are characteristic of his work, signs that make the weight of the past visible. His painting is, in this sense, deeply literary. For Margarethe he drew on Paul Celan's Todesfuge, a poem written out of the poet's experience in the concentration camps.

His references to Hitler, Speer and Richard Wagner, alongside Kabbalistic and Nibelung symbolism, seek to face the errors of the past and address the collective amnesia in which Germany was immersed after the defeat of Nazism. In the early 1990s, after travelling widely, he broadened his themes toward the global fate of art and culture and the human mind. Since 1993 he has lived and worked in Barjac, near Avignon, where he has built an artistic laboratory. His work has been shown at documenta in Kassel, at the Venice and Paris Biennales, and at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.