Born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, Anselm Kiefer is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses photography, painting, artist’s books, sculpture, installation, and architecture.
Kiefer studied law and romance languages before pursuing studies in Fine Art at the academies in Freiburg and Karlsruhe. Between 1971 and 1992, he lived and worked in the Odenwald, Germany. Early works especially explored German postwar identity, collective memory, history, and myth—occasionally alluding to Wagnerian themes or visually citing and deconstructing National Socialist architecture. Straw, plants, sand, photography, and lead emerged as primary material alongside quintessential artistic media.
After extensive travels throughout India, Asia, America, and North Africa, he settled in Barjac, South of France during the mid-1990s. There, over the course of several decades, he transformed the site of his studio-estate La Ribaute—now a part of Eschaton Foundation—into an immersive art environment, building towers, an amphitheater, and an intricate network of paths, tunnels, crypts and pavilions.
Layered with literary, philosophical, historical, and religious references—from poems to esoteric theories; from Catholicism to Kabbalah; from women of Antiquity to Madame de Staël—Kiefer’s works continue to present numerous interwoven significations that seep into one another along porous borders.
Since 1993, Anselm Kiefer lives and works in France
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HM Queen Sonja said: "It is a great honour for the QSPA board to present Anselm Kiefer with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his distinguished contribution to the art of printmaking through a long and outstanding career."
Anselm Kiefer’s monumental body of work represents a microcosm of collective memory, visually encapsulating a broad range of cultural, literary, and philosophical allusions—from the Old and New Testaments, Kabbalah mysticism, Norse mythology and Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Born during the closing months of World War II, Kiefer reflects upon Germany’s postwar identity and history, grappling with the national mythology of the Third Reich. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos. His boundless repertoire of imagery is paralleled only by the breadth of media palpable in his work.
Kiefer’s oeuvre encompasses paintings, vitrines, installations, artist books, and an array of works on paper such as drawings, watercolours, collages, and altered photographs. The physical elements of his practice—from lead, concrete, and glass to textiles, tree roots, and burned books—are as symbolically resonant as they are vast ranging. By integrating, expanding, and regenerating imagery and techniques, he brings to light the importance of the sacred and spiritual, myth and memory.
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Anselm Kiefer, Melancolia, 1996. Collage of woodcuts on paper with acrylic and shellac, mounted on burlap. Copyright : © Anselm Kiefer Photo : Atelier Anselm Kiefer
