Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer works from La Ribaute, a vast studio-estate in Barjac, France, where the landscape itself has become part of the practice. Born in Germany in 1945, during the closing months of World War II, he has spent decades confronting his country's postwar identity, the mythology of the Third Reich, and the ancestral currents of myth, literature, and cosmology.

The work is large-scale, material-dense, and layered with cultural memory — paintings that incorporate lead, ash, gold leaf, burned books, textiles, and sediment of electrolysis. His imagery draws from the Old and New Testaments, Kabbalah mysticism, Norse mythology, Wagner's Ring cycle, and the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.

Kiefer's oeuvre encompasses paintings, vitrines, installations, artist's books, and works on paper. The materials are as symbolically charged as the subjects they carry — an ongoing inquiry into loss, redemption, and the sacred weight of history.