Anselm Kiefer is the embodiment of Art itself—everything he touches turns into Art. And his mind is a universe where conflict and contradiction resolve through his creations. Kiefer begins all his work with an idea that “shocks” him. He has a concept in mind as he begins by manipulating materials intuitively. After the first step, he goes back and looks at it, analyzes it. When he sees something not of his conscious mind, he is aware he is working with a power larger than himself. A dialogue of questions and answers occurs at every stage of the work as the concept changes during the work process.

He uses a limitless palette of images and processes to emphasize the holy, the sacred, the mythological and the alchemical. Kiefer is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist blending the mediums of painting, sculpture, artist books, vitrines, and installation art, making them integrative and interactive. Works on paper include drawings, watercolors, collages, and altered photographs. His catalog of work reflects the wider and deeper knowledge of the collective memory. Through his personal experiences, processes, and use of tools, he deals with difficult subjects. Cultural, textual, and conceptual metaphors ranging from poetry, mythology, Biblical testaments, and the Kabbalistic mysticism embody his oeuvre.

Kiefer created his books as a symbol of learning and transmitting knowledge. According to him, lead is the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history. As he says, “I make my own books to find my way through old stories.” We find the use of lead books in the Rockefeller piece entitled Uraeus. His books in Language of the Birds have thick accumulations of rust, dirt, dust, straw, dried flowers suggesting time and history—strata upon strata of the ravages of time. His unconventional methods and media choices have resulted in a body of work with impermanent surfaces that have feelings of devastation, both natural and human. It suggests the effects of violence, war, and neglect. It allows all of us to share the vulnerability of being human. There is no endpoint to his work; it is all about the journey. As they place the pieces in situ, they continue to show entropy.

In 2018, Kiefer created his largest outdoor public sculpture, Uraeus, in Rockefeller Center. The thirty-foot wingspan sits twenty feet high above the lead books strewn about on the base. Uraeus refers to the Egyptian cobra wrapped around the lectern representing the goddess Wadjet and is a symbol of power and divine authority. The wings represent Egyptian royalty in homage to the vulture goddess Nekhbet. The book represents Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous philosophical work of fiction, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1891). The book talks of ideas of will to power, the death of God, and the idea of superman being the ultimate aspiration of human beings. This was Nietzsche’s magnum opus. As he described it, “With [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging centuries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights—the whole fact of man lies beneath it at a tremendous distance—it is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and goodness.”

Anselm Kiefer is represented by the White Cube, and Gagosian.

PLEASE SEE PORTFOLIO BELOW