Artist: Anselm Kiefer

A collection of notes on this artist, as I've become enamoured with his work.

"Anselm Kiefer’s work, foremost realised in painting, sculpture and large-scale installation, navigates the immensity of history and visions of humanity, specifically the political inheritances of post-war Germany. For Kiefer, the constructed linearity of history is a fiction where traditions, beliefs and mythologies intertwine in its making. Through heterogenous material and monumental creation, Kiefer’s imposing work considers the inaccessibility of meaning as well as the enormity of collective memory and loss. Central to the artist’s interpretation of the past is its enduring correspondence with the present and future, endowing the artist’s work with restorative qualities of transformation and hope."

www.whitecube.com/artists/anselm-kiefer

• Anselm Kiefer For Jean-Noël Vuarnet 24 January – 2 March 2024 at White Cube London
• Anselm Kiefer 25 June – 16 August 2025 at White Cube Mason’s Yard

• Anselm Kiefer at the Ashmolean Museum
  14 February – 15 June 2025 Oxford, UK
  The Ashmolean Museum presents a major survey of works by Anselm Kiefer produced between 1969 and 1982. Titled ‘Anselm Kiefer: Early Works’, the exhibition highlights the formative years of the artist’s career, bringing together paintings, photography, prints, artist books, watercolours and mixed-media works, alongside lesser-known pieces.
  This exhibition features works which some visitors may find challenging or shocking. It includes references to Nazism and depictions of the artist making the Nazi salute in protest against fascism.
  Born in 1945, Anselm Kiefer was among the first generation of Germans to confront the country’s troubled past and national identity in the wake of the second world war and the horrors of the Holocaust. Kiefer wrote, ‘If we don’t remember what we have done, we will do the same thing again.’ His work in the Occupations series (1969–70), where he makes the ‘Sieg Heil’ salute, constituted a protest against forgetting the crimes of the past, challenging viewers to ask themselves if such atrocities could ever happen again.

• Anselm Kiefer review – creative giant crushed under Van Gogh’s starry might
  Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
  This alienating exhibition makes the German artist look like a kitsch cabaret version of the Dutch master – the comparison is catastrophic for Kiefer.
  Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is at the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, from 7 March to 9 June, then the Royal Academy, London, from 28 June to 26 October
  
  ^{Dive-bombers … Anselm Kiefer’s Die Krähen (The Crows), 2019. Photograph: Georges Poncet/Collection of the artist, courtesy White Cube}

• Anselm Kiefer: Early Works review – his Nazi salute dominates a show haunted by horrors
  Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
  From shocking images of him Sieg Heil-ing to a woodland watercolour haunted by the atrocities of war, the German artist confronts his homeland’s fascist past – and it’s never felt so relevant. Anselm Kiefer: Early Works is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 14 February to 15 June 2025.
  
  ^{Scarred landscape … Wald (Forest), 1973–74. Photograph: Adam Reich/© Anselm Kiefer}

Quote by Kiefer on watercolour:

"I have always made watercolours. I like watercolours very much because the water does the work. The water flows and the paper gets buckled, and so part of it is completely unconscious and uncontrollable."