Anselm Kiefer

 

Donaueschingen 1945

 

The wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland. (A. Kiefer, 2005)

 

Born at Donaueschingen, in Germany, on March 8, 1945. He abandoned his studies of jurisprudence and in 1966 began to frequent the studio of the painter Peter Dreher. In 1969 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, where he was a pupil of the painter Horst Antes and, from 1972, of Joseph Beuys. In these years Kiefer produced a series of art actions, which he defined as Besetzungen [Occupations], in which he had himself photographed with arm raised in the Nazi salute in front of German sites significant for mythological or historical reasons. These images laid bare the recent nightmare of German society and were the starting point for the first of his “artist’s books.” Kiefer earned the label of nostalgic nationalist, which has created a number of problems in both organizing exhibitions and securing funding. In 1971 he settled at Ornbach, where he opened a studio in a former school building and began work on a cycle of large paintings, Deutschlands Geisteshelden [Germany’s Spiritual Heroes], completed in 1973. In about 1974 he produced his first paintings made by superimposing thick layers of paint and lacquer. He is sparing of biographical details, limiting himself to a terse "Autobiography" inserted in the catalog of his solo exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein of 1977. In 1978 he also began to work on woodcuts, which he used together with drawings in his compositions. At the same time he began to frequent Italy and in 1980 the Venice Biennale devoted a solo exhibition to his work. In 1982, following the success of his first exhibitions in America, he was invited to Kassel for the second time. In the mid-eighties he produced a whole series of works on Jewish history, presenting them in a new round of exhibitions in the United States in late 1987 and early 1989. Since the nineties he has had one studio in Buchen and another in Jerusalem. He began to investigate more universal themes, developing a broad imagery of myths and metaphors, evoking the complex events of the history of mankind, the ancestral epic of life, death, the cosmos and the fragile resistance of spiritual forces to destruction and violence. In 2007 he inaugurated the Monumenta program at the Grand Palais in Paris with an extensive installation of sculptures and paintings. He is the first living artist since Georges Braque in 1953 to create a permanent installation for the Louvre. He lives in France.