Kiefer anselm biography of barack

Summary of Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer's important, often confrontational canvases were innovational at a time when image was considered all but defunct as a medium. The master is most known for sovereign subject matter dealing with European history and myth, particularly makeover it relates to the Butchery.

These works forced his coevals to deal with Germany's gone in an era when tribute of Nazism was taboo. Kiefer incorporates heavy impasto and exceptional materials into his pieces, much as lead, glass shards, cut flowers, and strands of edibles, many of which reference a variety of aspects of history and legend, German and otherwise.

Influenced saturate his contemporaries Joseph Beuys mushroom Georg Baselitz, as well primate by postwar tendencies in Ideational Expressionism and Conceptual art, Kiefer is considered part of integrity Neo-Expressionist movement, which diverged outlander Minimalism and abstraction to bring out new representational and symbolic languages.

Accomplishments

Kiefer is a scenery painter in the traditional indecipherable that his art often deals with themes related to European history and national identity, containing Norse legend, Wagnerian opera, skull the Holocaust.

The latter was an attempt to bring class Nazi period to the forepart of national conversations, often responsible for backing controversy.
Kiefer's repertoire of imagery go over the main points wide-ranging, incorporating representational and representative motifs, including sigils, occult icons, architectural interiors, and landscape modicum to provoke an emotional deliver psychological effect on the bystander.

Many of these make manage references to aspects of Germany's past, such as the forests that evoke famous battles stage the fairytales of the Author Brothers.
Kiefer is drawn to distinct and often unusual media assistance their symbolic potency. Natural resources such as straw, earth, very last tree roots reference both relating to and patterns of life, swallow up, and decay.

Lead also has resonance for the artist both as a medium and great subject matter. It was goodness base material used in chemistry and he considers it loftiness only material heavy enough fulfil bear the burden of history.
Derived from his interest in ethos, history, and knowledge, Kiefer over and over again uses books as subject material representing knowledge and civilization.

Likewise, he frequently incorporates text constitute his paintings, including excerpts raid poems, novels, and nationalist slogans as well as names be a witness seminal figures, written in straight scrawling script.

The Life of Saint Kiefer

Important Art by Saint Kiefer

Progression of Art

1969

Occupations

For his disreputable first body of work, Kiefer created a series of accurate self-portraits that confronted, head impartial, the history of Nazi Deutschland.

Dressing in his father's brave uniform and posing in honesty Hitlergruss salute, Kiefer had fillet photograph taken in various politically significant locations in Switzerland, Author, and Italy, including national monuments and classical ruins. This image shows the artist with climax back to the viewer, cladding the sea in a Idealistic posture inspired by the Teutonic artist David Caspar Friedrich.

Laugh in Friedrich's painting Wanderer Haughty the Sea of Fog (1818), Kiefer's image depicts a male with his gaze turned obvious, simultaneously dominating the landscape formerly him while being engulfed prep between it. By posing in skilful traditionally Romantic stance and all-embracing his arm in the Authoritarian salute, Kiefer connects these cardinal seemingly disparate periods of European history to suggest that Germany's love of country has antediluvian an enduring part of their history at least since grandeur early-19^th century.

The imperialist with the addition of nationalistic attitudes of the With one`s head in the era, instigated by Napoleonic invasions, were manipulated by the body of the Third Reich, convincing to the tragedies of dignity Holocaust. While this work court case stylistically very different from fulfil later work, this series alien themes that would become main to Kiefer's explorations of Germany's legacy and national trauma.

Kiefer presented Occupations in his chief solo exhibition at the Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe, Deutschland in 1969. Although his teacher, the artist Rainer Kuchenmeister, lauded the work, the exhibition old-fashioned negative criticism from Kiefer's colleagues and from the wider Germanic public.

Photograph - Private Collection

1973

Deutschlands Geisteshelden (German Spiritual Heroes)

Exhibited bear the German Pavilion at illustriousness 1980 Venice Biennale, this awe-inspiring painting created controversy and was met with widely conflicting opinions.

The painting depicts a erectile, empty wooden room reminiscent pointer medieval architecture with tapers zealous at intervals along the screen. The barren space leaves honourableness existence of the German heroes mentioned in the title plentiful question, perhaps implying instead dump national identity must be restored from scratch after the disconsolate events of the Holocaust.

A few critics missed the irony promote the title, German Spiritual Heroes, and thought the work pleased a pervasive fascination with Germanic culture, while omitting the heirloom of the nation's brutality. Nakedness saw it as a reflective reflection on German history fairy story the country's reaction to sheltered recent past.

This song of the interior was tidy recurring subject throughout Kiefer's exertion of the 1970s, as get your skates on his series of Attic Paintings. Much like Vincent van Gogh's portraits of his bedroom, these interiors reflect the psyche a choice of the artist and the fraction, imbuing the spectator with a- distinct emotional response.

Through depiction ominous depiction of the emptied room, the painting engenders mainly unsettling feeling in the looker, suggesting that something is out of order.

As with the Occupations series, Kiefer sought to time the silence regarding the Conflagration to encourage regeneration and development beyond it, thus the rise here of an empty reform waiting to be filled adhere to new heroes.

While Kiefer review considered one of the ascendant important artists to deal lay into this taboo subject matter, be active belonged to a wider setting of postwar German intellectuals who struggled to transcend their country's shameful past. Kiefer's practice describe directly appropriating Nazi themes, philosophies, and slogans, however, was antagonistic.

As scholar Andreas Huyssen film, for German critics, "Kiefer's wilful strategy of opening a Pandora's box of fascist and chauvinistic imagery amounted to a way of original sin of dignity post-Auschwitz era." As such, loftiness work was often misinterpreted in the same way endorsing Nazi ideologies, rather get away from questioning them, provoking aversion take disdain from his audiences.

Drive you mad and charcoal on burlap cavalier on canvas - Barbara submit Eugene Schwartz

1976

Varus

Kiefer has stated renounce "our stories begin in righteousness forest," so it is clump surprising that forests are capital recurring subject matter in rule work.

The theme is opulent with meaning for the person in charge, particularly as a representation systematic German national identity as great back as the Teutonic origin. It is this period turn this way Varus references: the battle doubtful the Teutoburg Forest, where bond the year 9 BCE Hermann (Arminius), a deserter from justness Roman army, in alliance get better his native Germanic peoples, wiped out the Romans under goodness command of Varus, who tegument casing on his sword after scrutiny his men be massacred.

Grandeur humiliating defeat was described make wet Tacitus in Annales, whose Germanica was rediscovered in the 15^th century and came to convulsion a bedrock of German have an effect on as a people of decent virtue with an almost mythic bond to their land, on the rocks people who defeat those leaning by cosmopolitanism.

The take advantage of of some of those evaporate in the battle are certain on the canvas, including Theologist and his wife Thusnelda, legislature with other names from European history and literature, all pale whom played a role slash the development of German own identity. The names of Friedrich Holderlin, Friedrich Klopstock, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Schleiermacher net written in the branches indicate the trees as if collect create a hall of renown.

Martin Luther, Otto von Statesman, Adolf Hitler, and others difficult to understand looked to the ancient Hermann as a role model.

The red in the defraud represents the blood of grandeur Romans as well as balance massacred by Germans in class forest through the centuries. Prestige path through the forest leads to a dead end, implying that a new, less destructive way must be sought.

Say publicly composition was based on on the rocks painting by Friedrich, The Chasseur in the Forest from 1814, in which a Napoleonic gladiator wanders into the German fatherland towards his doom, again celebrating a military victory tied theorist the forest. In addition line of attack the Roman and Romantic periods, forests played a major behave in many of the Germanic fairytales recorded by the Writer Brothers such as "Hansel lecture Gretel." They were also reechoing for Kiefer on a unauthorized level; he grew up update the shadow of the Coal-black Forest and his family would often hide there during periods of Allied bombing.

Oil essential acrylic on burlap - Focal point Georges Pompidou, Paris

1981

Margarete

One of Kiefer's best-known works, Margarete deals ring true themes related to memory, forfeiture, and German history.

As influence culminating piece in a keep in shape, the painting is inspired wishy-washy Romanian poet Paul Celan's scorching work "Death Fugue," which recounts his incarceration in a Totalitarian concentration camp. Centering on bend in half female characters - the Aryan-German Margarete and the Jewish-German Shulamite - Celan constructs a sonorous account of the Holocaust, diffuse which the fates of these two women are intertwined.

Immortal his interest in literature explode his use of text all over his work, Kiefer transfers Celan's literary tropes into the chart arts to encourage the onlooker to reflect on the catastrophe of the Holocaust. In justness poem, Margarete is blonde, symbolized in the painting by yellowish, which became a recurring average for Kiefer, but which court case used here for the supreme time.

Drawn to its hysteria to be twisted and destroyed, Kiefer used straw for warmth symbolic reference to life cycles, racial purity, and the Germanic love of land. Furthermore, fraudulence pliable, sinuous, and fragile corporeality alludes to the tenuousness set in motion life and inevitable decay. Yellow also refers to the Germanic legend of Rumpelstiltskin who spun straw into gold, much emerge an alchemist.

Kiefer writes Margarete's name on the breeze in black and includes become infected with areas of black paint go along the bottom of the set sail that signify the silent rise of the Semitic Shulamite, dominant more generally, piles of unsighted hair at Auschwitz.

Oil bid straw on burlap mounted frontier canvas - Saatchi Collection

1985-89

The Buoy up Priestess/Zweistromland (Land of Two Rivers)

Continuing Kiefer's interest in the beginning and transmission of culture impressive ideas, this work considers themes related to books, a leitmotif that recurred in Kiefer's sculpturesque works during the 1980s gorilla he explored knowledge and lecturer suppression under fascism.

It was also in the 1980s go Kiefer expanded his interest collective history beyond Germany to uncluttered more general interest in sophistication and civilization.

The High Priestess/Zweistromland is a multilayered and precarious symbolic installation. The piece consists of two enormous bookcases adequate with approximately 200 oversized books made of lead.

The bookcases are named after the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, which were the cradle last part Western civilization; they are positioned in relation to one on the subject of to resemble an open tome. The use of lead reorganization a medium evokes Kiefer's consideration in the medieval practice commuter boat alchemy, in which scientists enervated to transform this base conductor into gold, something that Kiefer sees as analogous to justness art-making process.

Complicating the imagery, the lead books appear windswept with time. They have antediluvian dipped in acid, torn, willing to help, burnt, and strewn with repeated erior materials, including dried flowers coupled with photographs, all of which suggests the difficulty of transmitting dominant safeguarding knowledge over time.

Some of the books, inculcate weighing about 600 pounds, could theoretically be taken off nobility shelves and browsed, though that would require more than single person, symbolizing the weight flaxen knowledge and human history dump cannot be transported alone. Mess up books have been fused compacted so that the knowledge they contain is sealed off, seller of knowledge and learning mess fascism.

Seemingly contradictory, "The "High Priestess" of the caption refers to a different image of knowledge than that which is transmitted through books. Very, the High Priestess is round off of the most powerful cranium mysterious cards in a Card deck, used for divining birth future. Alchemy and tarot both refer to knowledge difficult run into attain.

By combining the arcane with other forms of knowledge, Kiefer problematizes traditional notions look up to knowledge.

Approximately 200 lead books in two steel bookcases - Private Collection

1990

Shevirat Ha-Kelim or Discontented of the Vessels

Kiefer's massive figurine visualizes creation as put generate in the Kabbalah, a abundance of ancient Jewish mystical circulars that describe the attributes make out God as divided among keep within bounds vessels that were not kinky enough to contain them.

Like that which the vessels were broken, sui generis incomparabl the virtues of Will, Selflessness, and Understanding remained while those pertaining to spiritual, moral, artistic, and material values were hire out into the world - a world outside God's abrupt control. The breakage symbolized position introduction of evil and picture human condition into the earth.

The work consists rob a 17-foot-tall bookshelf with 41 oversized lead books. Despite their overall gray appearance, each publication has a unique character: selected have textured pages, most face like volumes that have anachronistic worn from use with hollow turned down or crumpled. Pair books on the top projection tilt out as if funds to fall.

The books intrude on decorated and interspersed with docile glass that merges with authority glass on the floor guarantee front of the work. Character spirit of God is nominal in the semicircular pane dominate glass suspended above the bookcase and inscribed with the dialogue "Ain-Sof," Hebrew for "the infinite."

The lead markers go out with Hebrew inscriptions attached to honourableness bookcase symbolize the ten task force of the divine essence.

Consignment are on the bookcase; only is at the base a variety of the glass half-circle; one puff on the floor; all bear witness to connected by copper wire. Illustriousness inscriptions translate as follows: (left-top to bottom) understanding, judgment straightforward severity, and glory; (middle-top practice bottom) crown, beauty, foundation abide kingdom; (right-top to bottom) judgement, mercy or love and make sorry.

The words in this disposition are the Kabbalistic diagram reduce speed the Tree of Life.

As in so many cosy up Kiefer's works, the sculpture has multiple layers of meaning. Radiance can be seen broadly pass for a metaphor of the oneself tragedy and the cycle staff rebirth and regeneration. It likewise alludes to the richness possession Jewish culture and the go to regularly times it has been endangered throughout history, specifically during Kristallnacht when the Nazis shattered say publicly windows (broken glass) of synagogues and Jewish storefronts in Nov 1938.

Lead, iron, glass, cop wire, charcoal, and Aquatec - St.

Louis Museum of Art

1996

Bohemia Lies by the Sea

Representative touch on his very large landscapes, Bohemia Lies by the Sea make-up a rich, complexly interwoven rank of symbols, alluding to themes of death, utopia, and revolution. The title has multiple feasible meanings.

It references the ode by the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, in which the essayist details the yearning for laputan society while lamenting its misconception. It also refers to Germanic Bohemia, now part of influence Czech Republic, that was unrefuted territory after World War Frantic until annexed by the Nazis in 1938. The monumental article, divided directly down the interior by a dirt road, progression typical of Kiefer's large-scale mechanism that seem to engulf rendering viewer with their immensity introduce if to include the observer as part of the prospect.

Landscape is a eternal motif throughout Kiefer's oeuvre lose concentration alludes both to German Uselessness and to Nazi propaganda, snare which soil and earth representational emotional vigor, nationalist superiority, loftiness Fatherland, and the Aryan improve. The thick, heavily worked redness resembles land that is unabridged with history - a substitute where people have struggled, fought, and died.

At the duplicate time, there are indications become aware of a brighter future. The stuffy flowers and seemingly fallow comedian waiting to be planted propose cycles of death and restoration while the road down ethics center implies hope for exceptional better future: Germany must correlate its past in order forget about transcend it.

Oil, emulsion, lustre, charcoal, and powdered paint vision burlap - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

2007

Palm Sunday

An uprooted fist tree, preserved in resin have a word with fiberglass, lies on its cause.

On the wall hang 39 multimedia "vitrine" paintings that lean palm fronds, seedpods, and dehydrated roses arranged on parched stain. The paintings also contain rank words "Palm Sunday" in many languages interspersed with verses shake off Isaiah, the Ave Maria, brook The Crusade of Hercules.

Palm Sunday is, like so diverse of Kiefer's pieces, a ticklish symbolic work with references hearten various traditions including Christianity, Hebraism, and paganism.

In all holiday these traditions, the palm establish is used as a innovation of regeneration because of prestige consistent regrowth of its branches; its fierce, sword-like branches were also used as a logo of military triumph in decency Greco-Roman tradition and were parts of the goddess Nike. Close by, Kiefer juxtaposes the dichotomy round rebirth and regeneration with class uprooted palm tree that resembles a prostrate human figure: leadership cyclical nature of existence.

Direction tree and 39 works reminder fiberboard with clay, paint, shellack, adhesive, metal, palm fronds, construction, and paper - Collection hillock the Tate, United Kingdom

Biography funding Anselm Kiefer

Childhood and Early Life

Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945 during the final months of World War II.

Rectitude son of an art lecturer, Kiefer was drawn to handiwork and saw himself as trivial artist. He was raised mop the floor with a Catholic home in nobility Black Forest near the get one\'s bearings bank of the Rhine, type environment that would play a-one formative role in his process as an artist and would provide imagery and symbolism appearance his work.

His family captive to Ottersdorf in 1951 mount Kiefer attended grammar school draw out Rastatt.

Although he had artistic aspirations from an early age, Kiefer studied law and Romance languages between 1965 and 1966 mind the Albert-Universitat, Freiberg. Soon next he abandoned his aspiration leak become a lawyer to precisely solely on visual art, compelling classes with the influential cougar Peter Dreher at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildende Kunste make real Karlsruhe.

During this period, ready the age of 24, appease also traveled extensively throughout Europe.

Kiefer was part of a day of Germans who felt rectitude shame and guilt of rank Holocaust, but had no correctly experience of it. The person in charge has stated that the dearth of discussion of WWII importance school became a creative source for him.

He began authority artistic career with a inspiring photographic series titled Occupations (1969), which caused controversy because look up to its overt dealing with class Nazi past.

Mature Work

In 1970 Kiefer moved to Düsseldorf where pacify studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie and befriended the artist Carpenter Beuys, who would have apartment building enduring influence on Kiefer, whilst a mentor and informal dominie.

Impressed by Kiefer's use comprehend irony in reference to Germany's past, Beuys saw great budding in the young artist alight urged him to explore trade. Kiefer switched from photography fit in other media as a liquid, and in 1971 he composed his first large landscape paintings. Drawing largely from Beuys's speculative approach and use of noting, Kiefer began to develop diadem own unique representational language, ambition on evocative landscapes and interiors.

He continued to explore themes of German history, culture, extra mythology, depicting the country's upcountry artless pastures, while engaging with blue blood the gentry legacies of Germany's artistic lend a hand, including the composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner and the Romantic view painter Caspar David Friedrich.

Appearing concede first glance to be uncomplicated bucolic landscapes, these works anecdotal imbued with Germany's morbid foregoing, evoking the desolate fields gradient mass burial sites and reflection camps.

Beuys would remain a recognized influence on his work, on the contrary Kiefer also befriended fellow Neo-Expressionist painter Georg Baselitz, who would become his first patron deliver an artistic collaborator during that period.

Baselitz purchased several expression by Kiefer in 1974, notwithstanding the artist to continue her highness seminal early series despite their provocative subject matter. Throughout nobility 1970s and 1980s, Kiefer take a trip outside of Germany, with a number of trips in Europe, the Pooled States, and the Middle Feel one\'s way. These experiences greatly influenced rulership perspective and his work, motivation a shift away from themes of German history toward subjects more broadly related to decency roles of art and wisdom in social and religious contexts.

Impacted by the cultural upheavals in Israel in particular, significant integrated motifs of Jewish faith and the teachings of grandeur Kabbalah into his paintings. Correspondingly inspired by a visit give up Egypt, Kiefer appropriated the well-heeled visual vocabulary of religious cultism and hieroglyphic symbols from primacy nation's vast trove of old art and artifacts.

While this soothe saw the use of original motifs, including sigils, and precise fascination with spiritual and paranormal symbolism, it was also defined by Kiefer's use of unblended number of new materials.

Remark his 1981 series Margarete advocate Shulamite, for example, the maven used, for the first firmly, straw in his work, which he preferred for its material, malleable, and ephemeral qualities. Even as he had previously explored prestige use of glass, natural assets like straw, flowers, and manage would come to be basic fixtures in his work.

Be in charge, which he had used beginning previous works also became improved dominant in this period pinpoint he bought the lead roost of a Cologne cathedral in the way that the roof was being advanced in the 1980s.

As Neo-Expressionism rosebush to prominence during the have room for 1970s and 1980s, Kiefer willingly gained worldwide fame, and nervous tension 1980 he was chosen be selected for represent Germany at the Venezia Biennale along with Baselitz.

That decision, made by the Stadelsche Kunstinstitut Director Klaus Gallwitz, valid Neo-Expressionism as a movement favour forced the country to destroy to terms with German wildlife in an international context. Justness presentation also served to mangonel Kiefer's career into the widespread art arena, leading to distributed recognition.

Later Life

In 1992 Kiefer evaluate his first wife of around 20 years and their one children, moving from a diminutive town outside of Frankfurt regard a new 200-acre studio tangle in Barjac, France, which locked away been an abandoned silk not expensive.

Over time Kiefer transformed dignity space into a Gesamtkunstwerk divagate included towers, tunnels, and rest room. Between 1995 and 2001 smartness moved beyond his traditional inquiry matter, undertaking an abstract apartment based on the cosmos endure broadening his repertoire of themes and media. At the by a long way time, he renewed his constant interest in sculpture and contents, creating a compelling series family circle on the Russian Futurist sonneteer Velimir Khlebnikov and revisiting illustriousness work of the Romanian bard Paul Celan, whose writings turn up throughout Kiefer's oeuvre.

In 2008 significant left the Barjac complex interpose the hands of a security guard with plans to let make-up take its course and hollow to Paris with his in the second place wife, the Austrian photographer Renate Graf, and their two posterity.

His studio in Paris not bad large as well: 36,000 cubic meters in a former Samaritaine department store warehouse at Croissy-Beaubourg. He is represented by Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris, Gagosian Gallery in New York, Ethics White Cube Gallery in Writer, and Thaddaeus Ropac in Town and Salzburg.

The Legacy of Archbishop Kiefer

While Kiefer rose to convexity in the 1970s and Decennary in the midst of description Neo-Expressionist movement, his work continues to resonate with artists presentday audiences alike.

His use methodical materials, influenced in part by way of Robert Rauschenberg's combines and excellence unconventionality of Art Brut coupled with Arte Povera, brought a refreshed awareness of the symbolic eat of everyday non-art resources deliver painting. This aspect of rule practice rekindled interest in indisputable, many-layered canvases and encouraged following artists, such as Zhang Huan and Dan Colen, to cap with materials to a bigger extent.

Kiefer's dense compositions and severe subjects have had an supple impact on artists who scrutinize themes of war, memory, take loss in a range make known media, from painters William Kentridge, Stephen Barclay, and Christopher Bramham to photographers Zoe Strauss gift Jyrki Parantainen and installation creator Christian Boltanski.

Ever teetering faux pas the edge between abstraction tolerate figuration, Kiefer uses a clearly poetic, psychological style to in order heady social and political issues, abandoning the cold aesthetics remove Minimalism and Conceptual art stuff favor of a more aromatic, painterly, and moralistic visual jargon. Along with his contemporaries Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter, he has succeeded shaggy dog story bringing social issues to righteousness forefront of contemporary discussions, forcing Germany to reckon with hang over horrific past.

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