Anselm Kiefer retrospective
A major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, honours the German artist Anselm Kiefer, who lives in France.
Anselm Kiefer has been among the world’s top ten most sought-after artists for many years. He was always something special. For example, although he is regarded as a student of Joseph Beuys, he was never in his class. “I once drove to Düsseldorf with my rolled-up pictures on the roof of a VW beetle to show them to Beuys.” He also rejects the traditional working process of a painter – from the idea to the sketch book to the final execution. “If I did that I would have to begin with an aim, a targeted result, and I’m not interested in that.” He once said his images were closer to nothing than to the perfection.
The Centre Pompidou in Paris is now showing a major retrospective of this “nothing”, with works from the late 1960s until today. The exhibition brings together almost 500 works covering 2,000 square metres. The paintings also include some world-famous works that illustrate the strong influence historical topics have had on Kiefer, e.g. Quaternity (1973), Varus (1976), Margarete (1981) and Sulamith (1983). The Forum of the Centre Pompidou is also showing visitors a monumental installation created by Kiefer in the southern French city of Barjac between 1993 and 2007. The interior of the installation is full of surprises, with a whole universe of materials preferred by the artist, such as ashes, lead, metal and thousands of photographs which the artist shot in the course of his career and which provide a biographical access to his work.
He left Germany almost 25 years ago
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 shortly before the end of the War in the air-raid shelter of a hospital in Donaueschingen. His father, an art teacher, taught him painting techniques at an early age. After completing his studies he first worked in the Odenwald region. His international breakthrough came in 1981 with the London exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting”. He left Germany in 1991, travelled to Nepal, Thailand, China, Australia and Mexico, and devoted himself to photography and writing before settling in France in 1993.
The Anselm Kiefer Retrospective, 16 December 2015 –18 April 2016 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris
