Anselm Kiefer (German, 1945 - )
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Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, in Donaueschingen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. After taking courses in law at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg from 1965 to 1966, he studied art there under Peter Dreher. He continued his studies with Horst Antes at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 1969 before transferring the following year to the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. Beuys\u2019s interest in deploying an array of cultural myths, metaphors, and symbols as a means by which to engage and understand history inspired Kiefer. He first addressed the problem of history, particularly Germany\u2019s contentious history, in 1969 in a series dubbed Occupations, a collection of photographic self-portraits taken in France, Switzerland, and Italy, which show him in military garb with his arm raised in a Hitlerian salute. That same year, Kiefer had his first solo exhibition, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe.Occupations signaled the future direction of Kiefer\u2019s work. In his endeavor to explore his identity and heritage through art making, he boldly confronted Theodor Adorno\u2019s declaration: \u201cTo write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.\u201d Early works, like Winter Landscape (1970) and Man in the Forest (1973), highlight human suffering and loneliness. In 1973 Kiefer turned his attention to architecture, painting a series of large-scale canvases set in the wood-grained attic of his home. With highly symbolic titles, including Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1973) and Germany\u2019s Spiritual Heroes (1973), these interiors possess a distinct psychological charge, much like van Gogh\u2019s representations of his own bedroom. The cavernous attic is a metaphor for the artist\u2019s mind, a universe in which conflict and contradiction are resolved through creation.
The profane realities of history overtook myth in Kiefer\u2019s work as of 1974. His canvases, with backdrops of charred and smoldering ploughed earth, became increasingly hermetic in their iconography, decipherable only with the help of the words and phrases he inscribed on them. Cockchafer Fly (1974) includes text from a German nursery rhyme, revealing the subject to be Pomerania, a German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Others, like Operation Winter Storm(1975) and Operation Sea Lion I (1975), reveal the artist\u2019s continued preoccupation with his homeland\u2019s Nazi past. During this same period, Kiefer commenced a series of paintings examining art\u2019s redemptive role in history. Nero Paints (1974) and To Paint (1974) consist of landscapes overlaid with a huge palette.
In the early 1980s, Kiefer\u2019s interest in content was accompanied by an equal focus on both the materiality of the canvas and the visual complexity of its surface, a concept he first began to explore in his book designs, the earliest of which dates to 1969. Kiefer introduced a host of new materials to his aesthetic vocabulary, including wood, sand, lead, and straw. These natural elements lend his work a marked fragility, often in contradiction to their stark subject matter. Margarete(1981) and Nuremberg (1982), for instance, invoke Nazi atrocities against Jews, but the shimmering presence of straw across their surfaces imbues them with a tactility of unsettling delicacy and beauty. Kiefer\u2019s preoccupation with Nazi rule precipitated another series of paintings during this period, which take the architecture of Albert Speer, the Führer\u2019s official builder, as their point of departure. Interior (1981), for example, shows the Mosaic Room in Hitler\u2019s Reich Chancellery.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, mystical and mythological themes continued to proliferate in Kiefer\u2019s ongoing dialogue with the past. With the approach of the new millennium, he looked beyond Germany for subject matter. Between 1995 and 2001, he undertook a cycle of monumental paintings of the cosmos. Light Compulsion (1999), the largest to date, shows the Milky Way, its depth and composition echoing that of Pollock\u2019s drip paintings. Architecture returned to the fore in 1997 with a series of archaic desert clay structures. In Your Age and My Age and the Age of the World (1997), an Egyptian pyramid rises from the barren earth. Since the late 1990s, Kiefer has devoted his energy increasingly to sculpture in mixed media; lead, however, remains a preferred material. Plants, too, are prominent in Kiefer\u2019s recent work. The pages of his artist\u2019s book The Secret Life of Plants (1997) as well as the surfaces of two paintings of the same title (1998 and 2001) contain images of sunflowers made using seeds from that blossom. Every Plant Has Its Related Star in the Sky (2001) ruminates on the related mysteries of the plant and celestial worlds. His more recent series of works, shown in 2005 at White Cube in London, incorporates oil, emulsion, acrylic and lead, and was inspired by the poetry of Russian modernist Velimir Chlebnikov.
The Japan Art Association presented Kiefer with the Praemium Imperiale Award in 1999. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984), Art Institute of Chicago (1987), Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2005), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2007). He lives and works in Barjac, France.
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