Creativity Quote by Anselm Kiefer

Kiefer’s line is a quiet refusal of the neat origin story. In an art world that loves to pin a finished canvas to a single formative trauma, a single political stance, a single “why,” he insists on a messier truth: motivation is ignition, not a map. What gets you to the studio is not what you end up making once time, material, failure, and obsession start steering.

The phrasing matters. “We should also not forget” reads like a corrective, as if the audience - critics, collectors, even admirers - is already mid-simplification. Kiefer is warning against biography as a shortcut. It’s a pointed move for an artist so often discussed through the weight of German postwar memory, guilt, myth, and historical ruin. His work is routinely treated as evidence in a cultural trial: here’s the motivation, here’s the verdict. He pushes back without denying the spark. The difference is not an escape hatch from history; it’s a claim about process.

The subtext is almost procedural: once the work begins, intention fractures. Materials assert themselves, the image develops its own logic, and the artist becomes less a spokesperson than a negotiator with the thing being made. Kiefer’s practice - lead, ash, straw, monumental scale, the alchemy of decay - dramatizes that gap. The result carries residues of the initial motive, but it also records everything that happened after: the labor, the compromises, the discoveries, the accidents. He’s telling us to judge the artwork as an event, not a confession.