Anselm Kiefer Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, in southwestern Germany, just as the Second World War was ending. The landscape of ruins, rebuilding, and silences about recent history formed a powerful backdrop to his childhood and later artistic concerns. As a young man he first pursued studies in law and literature in Freiburg before committing to art. He trained at academies in Karlsruhe and Dusseldorf, where he encountered mentors who shaped his direction. The painter Peter Dreher encouraged disciplined looking and an understanding of painting as a long, introspective practice. At the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf he came into the orbit of Joseph Beuys, whose expansive concept of art as social sculpture and whose insistence that postwar German artists confront history deeply marked Kiefer. Around him, contemporaries such as Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter were redefining painting in West Germany, creating an environment of debate and experimentation that sharpened his ambitions.

First Works and the Weight of History
Kiefers earliest mature works from the late 1960s and early 1970s confronted the iconography of German nationalism and Nazism directly. The series often referred to as Occupations showed the artist performing the Nazi salute in various European settings, a deliberate provocation meant to expose suppressed memory and to test the boundaries between representation, complicity, and critique. He also began painting monumental interiors and landscapes populated by names and citations, invoking the ghosts of German culture. Works such as Germanys Spiritual Heroes staged a reckoning with the canon and the damaged legacy of Romanticism. These projects, developed in the aftermath of his studies with Beuys, intertwined performance, photography, and painting, and ignited intense critical debate in Germany and abroad.

Materials, Methods, and Influences
Kiefer became known for a materially rich, alchemical approach to painting and sculpture. He worked with oil, straw, ash, clay, shellac, sand, lead, and later cast concrete and stacked lead books. The slow, heavy, and fragile qualities of these substances embodied themes of memory, mourning, and transformation. Literature played a central role: the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, often inscribed or evoked in titles, guided him toward the ethical and linguistic fractures left by genocide. He also engaged with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, with the Kabbalistic tree of the Sefirot, and with myths of destruction and renewal. In celebrated paintings like Margarete and Sulamith he set Celans imagery of golden hair and ashen hair against scorched fields and charred architecture, using straw and lead to make metaphor tactile. The artist book became a recurring form as well; his oversized, leadbound volumes suggested knowledge both preserved and endangered.

Recognition and Debate
From the late 1970s onward Kiefer exhibited in major international forums, including Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale. He drew ardent supporters who saw his project as a necessary excavation of memory, and skeptical critics who worried that grand scale and mythic references risked aestheticizing a catastrophically violent past. The curator Norman Rosenthal and gallerists such as Marian Goodman helped bring his work to broader publics, while museums in Europe and the United States collected key pieces. By the late 1980s a large retrospective traveled in North America, reaching institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and cementing his reputation as one of the central postwar painters. Awards from Europe, Israel, and Japan, including the Praemium Imperiale and the Wolf Prize in the Arts, recognized the scope of his achievement even as debate around his methods continued to animate scholarship.

Barjac, Paris, and Monumental Projects
In the early 1990s Kiefer relocated to France and developed a vast studio complex near Barjac known as La Ribaute. There he constructed towers, tunnels, and amphitheaters, transforming the site into a total work where painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape converged. The move expanded the scale and ambition of his practice, allowing him to pursue sequences of works over years, even decades. He continued to work with lead, creating book sculptures and crashed airframes, and he cultivated fields of sunflowers whose dried stalks reappeared in paintings as emblems of cosmic cycles. Later, he established studios in the Paris region, deepening ties with French institutions. A landmark installation, The Seven Heavenly Palaces, found a permanent home at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, where towering concrete structures evoke ancient mysticism and modern ruins. He also accepted commissions and staged largescale exhibitions in monumental spaces, extending the theatrical dimension of his art.

Networks, Collaborations, and Personal Life
Throughout his career Kiefer moved within a web of artists, writers, curators, and patrons. Joseph Beuys remained a touchstone, not as a style but as a challenge to think art in societal terms. Dialogues with contemporaries such as Baselitz and Richter unfolded through exhibitions and critical discourse rather than formal alliances, underscoring a generation wrestling with painting after trauma. The poet Paul Celan, long deceased by the time Kiefer began painting, nonetheless served as a spiritual companion through inscriptions, cycles, and dedications. In the professional sphere Marian Goodman played a crucial role in representing and contextualizing his work internationally, while museum figures in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States organized surveys that shaped public understanding. In his personal life he formed a partnership with the Austrian photographer Renate Graf; her images of his studios and works in progress, and her presence in his extended circle, attest to the porous boundary between life and art in his practice.

Exhibitions, Collections, and Honors
Kiefers works entered the collections of major museums, and he continued to appear in recurring global exhibitions. A highprofile presentation at the Grand Palais in Paris introduced his monumental vocabulary to new audiences. In London, a vast survey at the Royal Academy of Arts drew together decades of experimentation. He remained active in Germany through retrospectives and new commissions, even as his base stayed in France. The institutional embrace was matched by critical literature: art historians and essayists produced monographs and analyses probing his vocabulary of ruins, forests, constellations, and books of lead. Honors accumulated over time, confirming his place in the postwar canon while also acknowledging the difficulty and risk inherent in the subjects he chose to frame.

Legacy and Impact
Anselm Kiefers legacy lies in his insistence that painting and sculpture can wrestle with historys gravest questions without retreating into illustration or propaganda. He extended the material possibilities of painting, soldering, burning, and weathering surfaces until they became geological. He made reading and citation integral to visual art, turning the gallery into a library of contested memory. Through the guidance of teachers like Peter Dreher and Joseph Beuys, and in the intellectual company of poets such as Paul Celan, he formed a practice that fused material experiment with ethical inquiry. The controversies his work provoked were signs of its urgency, and the sustained attention of curators, gallerists, and fellow artists around him attests to its resonance. Across decades, he has shown how an artist born amid ruins could build a language equal to the task of remembrance, and how that language could continue to evolve as the past refuses to pass.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by Anselm, under the main topics: Art - Legacy & Remembrance - Nostalgia - Youth.

Other people realated to Anselm: Wim Wenders (Director)