I chose to do my artist presentation on Anselm Kiefer. I have been a fan of his work for some years so getting to see it in person in March 2017 was a really breathtaking experience and I wanted to share that with my classmates.
Anselm Kiefer is a German artist, currently 74 years of age. He primarily creates work by painting and sculpting. He makes dense, coagulated paintings, layered with materials from wire cages to sunflower seeds to children’s clothes. His works are characterised by an unflinching willingness to confront his culture's dark past, and unrealised potential, in works that are often done on a large, confrontational scale well suited to the subjects. He is the son of an art teacher and his father was an officer in the Wehrmacht - the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany. His childhood was not exactly typical. He was born into a Catholic family in Donaueschingen, a pretty town in the Black Forest. His mother gave birth to him in the cellar on the 8th March 1945 - just two months before Hitler’s suicide and the unofficial end of the second world war (in May 1945). They had to put wax in his ears to block out the noise of the bombings. As a young child without any toys he would play in the rubble and ruin of their bombed house, building houses from the scattered bricks. Perhaps it was this that gave him his penchant for ruination. His works often invoke a sense of detritus, incorporating materials such as straw, ash, clay, chalk, sand, dirt and lead.
After graduating high school in 1965 he attended the University of Freiburg, studying pre-law and Romance languages, but after 3 semesters he switched to Art, frequenting the art academies of Freiburg, Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf. In Karlsruhe, he studied under Peter Dreher, an important German realist and figurative painter. In 1969, aged 25, Kiefer received an Art degree and became known in the world of photography for staging a series of actions called Besetzungen [Occupations], in which he had himself photographed doing the Nazi salute at various European monuments. His aim was to wake up people’s consciences by insisting that Nazism was not dead but simply hiding in the shadows. «À l'école, le sujet était évoqué pendant deux semaines. À la maison, on ne l'évoquait pas». He recalls that they never spoke about it at home at during his brief stint as a pre-law student they discussed it for just a period of two weeks. In 1971 Kiefer moved to Hornbach, in southwestern Germany, where he established a studio. His output during this first creative time was known as The German Years. In 1992 he relocated to France and has lived and worked there since.
In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule and the horror of the Holocaust are particularly reflected in his work, (as well as spiritual concepts of Kabbalah); for instance, the painting "Margarethe" (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan's well-known poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"). Celan was a Romanian Jew whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust. After the war he went on writing in German, “In the language of the killers”, says Kiefer.
Some would consider him a 21st Century multimedia artist, despite the fact that he has done most of his work in the 20th century. Books are a recurring symbol in his work and it is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or historical places. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with the movements New Symbolism and Neo–Expressionism.
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