Anselm Kiefer

Biography

Velimir Khlebnikov calculated that decisive naval battles recur once every 317 years. Anselm Kiefer took the calculations seriously: in 2004–2005 he painted thirty pictures, two by three metres each, with toy battleships, rusted, battered, hung on twisted wire among waves of paint and plaster, and hung them in two rows of fifteen in a steel shed that reproduced his studio.

In 2017 Khlebnikov brought him to the Hermitage: from 30 May to 3 September, in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace, more than thirty works painted specially for the exhibition were shown. It was called “Anselm Kiefer, for Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations”.

Kiefer was born on 8 March 1945 in Donaueschingen, a few months before the end of the war, the son of an art teacher, and grew up among the ruins of a bombed town. In 1951 the family moved to Ottersdorf; he finished school in Rastatt in 1965. At eighteen he spent a whole year travelling through the Netherlands, Belgium and France to the places associated with Van Gogh, keeping a diary. At the University of Freiburg he began with law and Romance languages, switched after three semesters to the art academy, studied in Freiburg and Karlsruhe under Peter Dreher, a realist painter, and took his degree in 1969. That year the Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe held his first solo exhibition, “Occupations”: photographs in which, wearing his father’s Wehrmacht uniform, he raises his arm in the Nazi salute at various places in France, Switzerland and Italy. It was a demand that Germans remember what the xenophobia of the Third Reich had cost their culture, and it was a scandal. Around 1970 he studied informally with Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf, and from Beuys comes his habit of working with familiar substances: glass, straw, wood, parts of plants, later lead, ash, clay, shellac. Such pictures are fragile and short-lived, and he knew it.

In 1971 he settled in Hornbach in the Odenwald, in a former schoolhouse, with the studio in the attic; the twenty years he spent there are known as the German Years. The themes of the 1970s were German myth and Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung” (“Nothung” and “Parsifal”, 1973), “Germany’s Spiritual Heroes” (1973), “Ways of Worldly Wisdom: Arminius’s Battle” (1978–1980). In the early 1980s came more than thirty works with inscriptions from Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”, among them “Margarete” in oil and straw on canvas and “Your Golden Hair, Gretchen” (1981). In 1980–1983 he painted the stone hulks of the Nazi architecture of Speer and Kreis; in “To the Unknown Painter” (1983) it is the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery. In 1984–1985 he made works on paper with black-and-white photographs of wastelands with power lines, and “Heavy Cloud” (1985) answered the dispute over the stationing of NATO nuclear missiles in West Germany. In 1980, together with Georg Baselitz, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. From the mid-1980s the themes widened: Kabbalah, alchemy and Robert Fludd, Egypt, “Osiris and Isis” (1985–1987), and in 1995–2001 a cycle of large paintings of the cosmos. Since 1969 he has made books, at first from reworked photographs, later from sheets of lead, and lead books on steel shelves became his libraries of discarded knowledge. He came to love lead when repairing the pipes in his first house: as it melts, the metal gleams with the gold the alchemists sought.

In 1991 he left Germany and spent a year travelling through India, Mexico, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and the United States. In 1992 he settled at Barjac in the south of France, where he turned a former silk factory and the 35 hectares around it, La Ribaute, into a single structure: glass pavilions, archives, underground halls and corridors. Sophie Fiennes made a film about it, “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” (2010). In 2008 he moved to Paris; a hundred and ten lorries carried the work to a warehouse at Croissy-Beaubourg, the former depository of the La Samaritaine department store, and Barjac was left in the care of a caretaker. In the summer of 2019 he was working there again.

Since 2002 he has also worked in concrete: the towers for the Pirelli hangar in Milan. In 2007 the Louvre received his “Athanor” with two sculptures, the first permanent work by a living artist in the museum since Braque (1953), and the same year he opened the Monumenta series at the Grand Palais with works in honour of Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. There have been retrospectives in Düsseldorf (1984), Chicago (1987), Berlin (1991), Tokyo (1993), the Metropolitan Museum (1998), the Fondation Beyeler (2001), Bilbao (2007), the Royal Academy in London (2014), the Centre Pompidou for his seventieth birthday (2015), the Albertina (35 woodcuts, 2016), the Met Breuer (2017) and the Saint Louis Art Museum (2025–2026). The Hermitage holds his “Aurora”. His awards include the Wolf Prize (1990), Japan’s Praemium Imperiale (1999) and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2008); since 2018 he has also been an Austrian citizen. Wim Wenders made a 3D film about him, “Anselm” (2023). In 2026, in the Sala delle Cariatidi in Milan, he showed 42 canvases, “The Women Alchemists”, on forgotten women scientists, Sophie Brahe among them.