"The reason for this project comes from my childhood, that is clear to me. I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses"
About this Quote
Kiefer isn’t offering a cute origin story about DIY imagination; he’s sketching the moral geology of postwar Germany. “I did not have any toys” lands as deprivation, but also as indictment: a childhood where the usual props of innocence are missing because history has eaten them. The substitute materials matter. Not “stones” or “rubble,” but “the bricks of ruined buildings” - architecture as trauma, domestic space turned evidence. He doesn’t just play near ruins; he plays in them, occupying destruction as the only available playground.
The subtext is that creation and catastrophe are fused from the start. Building “houses” out of debris reads like a child’s instinct to restore order, yet it’s also a rehearsal for Kiefer’s later practice: assembling monumental works that look scorched, eroded, half-remembered. The line “that is clear to me” does quiet work, too. It signals a retrospective certainty, the adult artist claiming continuity and refusing the comforting myth that art floats above circumstance.
Context sharpens the edge. Born in 1945, Kiefer grows up amid physical wreckage and cultural denial - a nation rebuilding itself while dodging the psychic accounting. His materials and imagery repeatedly return to ruins, myth, and history’s residue; this quote frames that obsession less as aesthetic preference than as biographical inevitability. The project, whatever its specific form, is positioned as reconstruction with compromised materials: art made from what’s left, not what’s ideal. In that sense, the childhood game becomes a lifelong method - making shelter out of fragments while never letting the viewer forget why the fragments exist.
The subtext is that creation and catastrophe are fused from the start. Building “houses” out of debris reads like a child’s instinct to restore order, yet it’s also a rehearsal for Kiefer’s later practice: assembling monumental works that look scorched, eroded, half-remembered. The line “that is clear to me” does quiet work, too. It signals a retrospective certainty, the adult artist claiming continuity and refusing the comforting myth that art floats above circumstance.
Context sharpens the edge. Born in 1945, Kiefer grows up amid physical wreckage and cultural denial - a nation rebuilding itself while dodging the psychic accounting. His materials and imagery repeatedly return to ruins, myth, and history’s residue; this quote frames that obsession less as aesthetic preference than as biographical inevitability. The project, whatever its specific form, is positioned as reconstruction with compromised materials: art made from what’s left, not what’s ideal. In that sense, the childhood game becomes a lifelong method - making shelter out of fragments while never letting the viewer forget why the fragments exist.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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