Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Abendland (Twilight of the West)”, 1989, Lead Sheet, Polymer Paint, Ash, Plaster, Cement, Earth, Vanish on Canvas and Wood, 400 x 380 x 12 Centimeters, National Gallery of Australia

The huge scale of “Twilight of the West” creates a confrontational impact on the viewer that is not achieved with smaller easel paintings. Kiefer constructs works of this size with an underlying skeleton of broad gestural marks reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. He adopts a wide variety of pictorial devices, in particular the nineteenth-century Romantics’ use of the symbolic landscape to create a drama of epic proportions.

Kiefer uses his camera as a sketching tool: a number of his works are painted directly onto enlarged photographs or are based on photographs. The image of the railway tracks was recorded during his visit to Bordeaux perhaps as early as 1984. The sky is a vast sheet of lead above the horizon line. The metal sheet is worked, wrinkled and crumpled like paper. Lead is a powerful metal, both as a protection against radiation and as an industrial pollutant. It also has associations with alchemy as the base metal that might be transmuted into gold and, as such, it parallels the idea of metamorphosis that underlies Kiefer’s art.

Like the lead curtain, the landscape below it is near monochromatic. The limited range of colour reproduces the muting effect of twilight, with its dominance of red-browns and raking illumination. The sun, an impression of a manhole cover stamped in the soft lead sheet, is low on the horizon. Twilight, and a leaden veil of darkness, descends on our civilisation in this painting. But just as the manhole suggests a way out, so the sun will follow the night.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer: Paintings from the “Walhalla” Series

Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor, was born in 1945 and grew up playing in the rubble of postwar Germany, a childhood that has had a huge effect on his life and art. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. He works incorporating materials into his work, such as straw, ash, clay, lead and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan, whose works were also affected by the horrors of the war, played a role in developing Kiefer’s themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Athanor”” Oil on Canvas, 1991

Athanor is the painting executed in 1991 and exhibited in Berlin and Dresden. An evocative and controversial depiction of a Reichstag-like building as a brick oven makes Athanor – a monumental and a very important artwork that simultaneously presents a warning and a depiction of hope and potential to the German people. The title refers to the self-feeding furnace used by alchemists to keep the temperature during the process of turning lead into gold, and matter into spirit. This painting is a metaphor of the turbulent history of Germany, especially in regards to its art and culture. Created at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the painting evokes the memories of the destruction of Berlin in 1945, and the Reichstag fire in 1933.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Seven Heavenly Palaces”

Kiefer, born 1945 in Donaueschingen and long considered to be one of the most important German artists alive, gave each of the towers its own name: “Falling Stars,” “Sternenlager,” “Die Sefiroth,” “Tzim-Tzum,” “Shevirat Ha-Kelim,” “Tiqqun,” and “The Seven Heavenly Palaces.” For Kiefer, an important point of reference was the myth of creation in ancient Jewish mystical literature describing man’s part in God’s word.

Yet the artist has taken other points of reference into consideration in his work, as well, some of which are decidedly contemporary by comparison: in his usage of the material cement and his orientation along the customary dimensions of a shipping container, Kiefer establishes connections to present life marked more than ever before by globalization and possibility.

Kiefer, who has been living and working in Barjac, France since 1993, understands the universalism expressed in these works as an apt image of our time at the beginning of the 21st century. The cross-references and symbolism in “The Seven Heavenly Palaces,” which operates on several levels simultaneously, are numerous.

With the Sefiroth tower, for instance, the painter, sculptor, and installation artist takes recourse to the three mythological paths open to mankind for lending life order and meaning, according to ancient Jewish tradition: love, sympathy, and strength.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Sprache der Vögel”, 1989, Lead, Steel, Wood, Oil, Plaster, Resin and Acrylic

Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac.

The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer’s themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah. In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting “Margarethe” (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan’s well-known poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”).

His works are characterised by an unflinching willingness to confront his culture’s dark past, and unrealised potential, in works that are often done on a large, confrontational scale well suited to the subjects. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or historical places. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past.

This has resulted in his work being linked with the movements New Symbolism and Neo–Expressionism. Kiefer has lived and worked in France since 1992. Since 2008, he has lived and worked primarily in Paris and in Alcácer do Sal, Portugal.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Margarette”, Oil and Straw on Canvas, 1981, 280 x 380 cm, Tate Museum, London, England

Anselm Kiefer was born 1945 in Donauschingen, Germany, at the close of World War II. He studied art formally under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early 1970s where history and myth became central themes in his work.

In 1971 Kiefer produced his first large-scale landscape paintings and from 1973 he began to experiment with wooden interiors on a monumental scale. His preoccupation with recent German history is seen throughout his work and his use of recurring motifs, such as an artist’s palette symbolises his emotional journey relating to this period. Kiefer has made increasing use of materials such as sand, straw, wood, dirt and photographs, as well as sewn materials and lead model soldiers. By adding found materials to the painted surface Kiefer invented a compelling third space between painting and sculpture. Recent work has broadened his range yet further: in 2006 he showed a series of paintings based around the little-known work of the modernist Russian poet Velimir Chlebnikov.