Anselm Kiefer

Zusatztext

For Anselm Kiefer, painting is an interpretation of the world whose magic lies in its ambiguity. Born in Donaueschingen in 1945, he is one of the most important visual artists of our time. Despite an astonishing artistic development that led him from performance to painting and sculpture, it is possible to identify major thematic and motivic complexes in his work. These are the world of religions and their (resurrection) myths, the world of Germanic myths and legends and their historical intersections, recent German history, which he links to "Germany's spiritual heroes", and finally the materials of modern memory and its carriers of tradition, above all the book and photography. In all of this, Kiefer treads on the ground of history as a provocateur, but always under the premise of the potential accomplice that he could have been, given an earlier birth. His artist's books collect, organize and preserve the evidence and starting points of such historical variants, which he projects into his own biography. He often creates meaning from the interaction of image and writing. His picture titles, often quotes from Celan to Bachmann, move on the border between the symbolic and the concrete, since in the artist's eyes art always has to do with the appropriation of the incomprehensible and the processing of those residues that are usually hidden from the lifeworld of the individual. With numerous new paintings and objects, most of which have never been shown before, which in addition to the classic painter's colors acrylic and oil also include materials such as lead, ash, shards, pieces of clothing or snakeskin, this volume accompanies the artist's first major show in Germany in more than 10 years.

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