Anselm Kiefer

(German, born 1945)

Anselm Kiefer is a German artist who has explored his country’s postwar identity, history, and mythology throughout his career. A painter, sculptor, and installation artist, materiality figures heavily into Kiefer’s practice. His large-scale paintings achieve their characteristic texture through his liberal application of pigments combined with found organic matter, metal, and lead, resulting in stark, haunting images with an imposing physicality. “Ruins, for me, are the beginning,” he mused. “With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.” Born on March 8, 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, Kiefer grew up in the aftermath of bombed houses, something which made a profound impact on him. The artist went on to study under the influential Conceptual artist Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. While in Düsseldorf during the 1970s, he developed an interest in working with diverse materials and was influenced by the Neo-Expressionist painters Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorf. In 2016, the artist’s exhibition “Walhalla”—which takes its name from the warrior’s heaven of Norse mythology—opened at White Cube gallery in London to critical acclaim. Kiefer currently lives and works in Paris, France. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others.