Anselm Kiefer

Information about Anselm Kiefer

Biography: Anselm Kiefer (German, 1945 - )

Using history as the lens for his contemporary work, German artist Anselm Kiefer has created a dynamic and gripping body of work that unabashedly draws themes from controversial moments in our shared past. Touching on taboo topics while also often incorporating unconventional materials into his art, Kiefer stresses the visceral rawness of reality. 

Born in the southwestern German town of Donaueschingen in 1945, Kiefer endured his earliest years amid World War II and eventually went on to study art in the 1960s. It was during his training at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenen Künste that Kiefer met Joseph Beuys, whose penchant for engaging with themes from history proved inspirational to Kiefer. He took these themes as a primary inspiration, channeling the angst, violence, and destruction of wartime into highly evocative works. Such can be seen in works like Winter Landscape(1970; Metropolitan Museum of Art), wherein a disembodied and bloodied head floats above a desolate, wintery field whose snow-covered surface is marred by blood-red stains that dapple the ground, a parable for the loss of life – and the devastation of the land – that resulted from wartime confrontations. These themes – particularly those tied to the Nazi regime – took center stage for much of Kiefer’s work in the 1970s. 

In the decade that followed, Kiefer introduced to these challenging subjects and symbols an exploration of both material and surface in his work. For example, his powerful Margarethe(1981; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) recalls a poem by Paul Celan entitled “Death Fugue”, where the straw laid upon the surface of the painting alludes to Celan’s character Margarethe who is suffering at the hands of Nazi forces during the Holocaust. The straw, rough and yet luminescent, creates a dynamic surface that is at once both horrifying and captivating. Such themes were not manifest without controversy, as scholars who have discussed Kiefer’s body of work have challenged his motives in revisiting such painful periods of the past. 

Nevertheless, this probing of past events along with experimenting with surface for powerful results endured over the years that followed, from the lead propeller projecting from the surface of Faith, Hope, Love(1984-1986; Art Gallery New South Wales) to the superimposed ax in a forest scene in his recent Gordian Knot series (2018-2019). By building up these surfaces, Kiefer asks his audience to peel back the layers and to investigate more fully, a metaphor for our necessary reckoning with history as well. 

His consistent pursuit of the meaning of symbol and surface has meant that Kiefer often defies traditional categorization among the varied fields of contemporary art. The result of this freedom is an ongoing sense of anticipation in Kiefer’s work that provides an indelible spark of fascination. 

Sources:

“Anselm Kiefer.” The Guggenheim. 

Ian Alteveer, “Anselm Kiefer (born 1945).” Metropolitan Museum of Art – Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.