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Augusta Stylianou Gallery 
Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah. In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting "Margarethe" (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan's well-known poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"). His works are characterised by a dull/musty, nearly depressive, destructive style and are often done in large scale formats. In most of his works, the use of photography as an output surface is prevalent and earth and other raw materials of nature are often incorporated. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or places particularly pregnant with history. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with a style called "New Symbolism." Anselm Kiefer is represented in Paris by Yvon Lambert Gallery.[1] Life and work Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany on March 8, 1945. In 1951 he moved to Ottersdorf and attended grammar school in Rastatt. In 1966 he left law and Romance language studies at University of Freiburg to study at art academies in Freiburg, Karlsruhe, and Düsseldorf. In Karlsruhe, he studied under Peter Dreher, an important realist and figurative painter. Kiefer began his career as a photographer with performances in which he mimicked the Nazi salute calling for Germans to remember and to acknowledge the loss to their culture through the mad xenophobia of the Third Reich. In 1969 at Galerie am Kaiserplatz, Karlsruhe, he presented his first single exhibition "Besetzungen (Occupations)" with a series of photographs about controversial political actions. By 1970 while studying under Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, his stylistic leanings resembled Georg Baselitz' approach. He worked with glass, straw, wood and plant parts. The use of these materials meant that his art works became temporary and fragile, which Kiefer himself is well aware of. The fragility of his work contrasts with the stark subject matter in his paintings. This use of familiar materials to express ideas was influenced by Joseph Beuys' art practice, in which Beuys used fat and carpet felt. It is also typical of the Neo-Expressionist style. In the 1970s he incorporated German mythology (see also: Jonathan Meese) in particular, and in the following decade he argued with the Kabbalah. He went on expanded journeys throughout Europe, USA and the middle east, in which the latter two journeys further influenced his work. Besides paintings, Kiefer created sculptures, watercolors, woodcuts, photographs and books. By the 1980s, Kiefer’s themes widened from a focus on Germany's role in civilization to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involved not only national identity and collective memory, but also occult symbolism, theology and mysticism. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life. In 1990 he was awarded a Wolf Prize. In 1999 the Japan Art Association awarded him the Praemium Imperiale for his lifetime achievements. In the explanatory statement it reads: "A complex critical engagement with history runs through Anselm Kiefer's work. His paintings as well as the sculptures of Georg Baselitz created an uproar at the 1980 Venice Biennale: the viewers had to decide whether the apparent Nazi motifs were meant ironically or whether the works were meant to convey actual fascist ideas. Kiefer worked with the conviction that art could heal a traumatized nation and a vexed, divided world. He created epic paintings on giant canvases that called up the history of German culture with the help of depictions of figures such as Richard Wagner or Goethe, thus continuing the historical tradition of painting as a medium of addressing the world. Only a few contemporary artists have such a pronounced sense of art's duty to engage the past and the ethical questions of the present, and are in the position to express the possibility of the absolution of guilt through human effort." Since 1992 he established in Barjac, France and transformed his 35-hectare studio compound La Ribaute into a Gesamtkunstwerk. His studio is enormous and in many ways is a comment on industrialization. He has created there an extensive system of glass buildings, archives, installations, storerooms for materials and paintings, subterranean chambers and corridors. From 1995 to 2001, Kiefer started a cycle of large paintings of the cosmos. He also started to turn to sculpture, though lead still remains his preferred medium. In 2006, Kiefer’s exhibition, Velimir Chlebnikov, was first shown in a small studio near Barjac in the South of France then moved to White Cube in London and finished in the Aldrich Museum in rural Connecticut. The work consists of 30 large paintings—six-feet high and around 10-feet long—hanging on two banks of 15 on facing walls of an expressly constructed grooved steel building that mimics the studio in which it was originally created. The work refers to the eccentric theories of the Russian futurist philosopher/poet Velimir Chlebnikov, who invented his own "language of the future" which he called "Zaum", and postulated, among other things, that cataclysmic sea battles shift the course of history once every 317 years. In his paintings, Kiefer’s toy-like battleships—misshapen, battered, rusted and hanging by twisted wires—are cast about by paint and plaster waves. The work’s recurrent color notes are black and white and gray and rust, and their surfaces are rough and slathered with paint and plaster and mud and clay.[2] In 2008, Anselm Kiefer was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Art historian Werner Spies said in his speech, that Kiefer is a passionate reader who takes impulses from literature for his work.[3] In 2009, Kiefer mounted two exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London. A series of forest diptychs and triptychs enclosed in glass vitrines, many filled with dense Moroccan thorns, was entitled Karfunkelfee, a term from German Romanticism stemming from a poem by the post-war Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. In The Fertile Crescent, Kiefer presented a group of epic paintings inspired initially by a trip to India fifteen years earlier where he first encountered rural brick factories. Over the past decade the photographs Kiefer took in India "reverberated" in his mind to suggest a vast array of cultural and historical references, reaching from the first human civilisation of Mesopotamia to the ruins of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, where he played as a small boy. "Anyone in search of a resonant meditation on the instability of built grandeur", wrote the historian Simon Schama in his catalogue essay, "would do well to look hard at Kiefer’s The Fertile Crescent".[4] Sophie Fiennes filmed Kiefer's studio complex in Barjac for her documentary study, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), which recorded both the environment and the artist at work. One critic wrote of the film: "Building almost from the ground up in a derelict silk factory, Kiefer devised an artistic project extending over acres: miles of corridors, huge studio spaces with ambitious landscape paintings and sculptures that correspond to monumental constructions in the surrounding woodland, and serpentine excavated labyrinths with great earthy columns that resemble stalagmites or termite mounds. Nowhere is it clear where the finished product definitively stands; perhaps it is all work in progress, a monumental concept-art organism."[5] Around 2008, Kiefer left his studio complex at Barjac and moved to Paris. A fleet of 110 lorries transported his work to a warehouse on the Périphérique, outside Paris. A journalist wrote of Kiefer's abandoned studio complex: "He left behind the great work of Barjac — the art and buildings. A caretaker looks after it. Uninhabited, it quietly waits for nature to take over, because, as we know, over our cities grass will grow."[6] Awards * 1983 Hans-Thoma-Preis
References 1. ^ Yvon Lambert Biography, Criticism, Catalogues, Mongraphs * Danto, Arthur. in "Anselm Kiefer". Encounter and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present. New York: Farrar Strauss Grioux, 1990. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/ ", Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
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