Born in 1945
German nationality
Artistic movement : neo-expressionism
Number of works in the collection : 14
LISTEN TO THE CULTURAL MEDIATOR’S COMMENTARY
Mathilde accompanies you during your visit:
QUOTES FROM THE ARTIST
“History for me is a material, like landscape or colour.”
“As a child, I wanted to become Jesus and then the Pope. In fact, I always dreamed of the impossible. I wanted to get out of my petty bourgeois milieu, in which I felt limited, locked up. Embracing a career as an artist seemed to me to be the way to escape from it.”
“Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we going to become? are fundamental questions. The human being is a microcosm within the macrocosm, we cannot forget that. I, for my part, am convinced that I have preserved memories prior to my existence on earth; I have the impression that my memory goes back to the time of the dinosaurs. To try to understand, I have studied different propositions: Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Aztec mythologies, and then Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism.”
IN THE EYES OF YVON LAMBERT
“The works on paper all have a story for me that I share with Anselm such as his passion for the great myths of origins, his discovery of the history of my country through the family tree of the Queens of France, his erudition for German opera, literature and the constitution of the French language which he now knows perfectly well. […] For Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles, I saw Anselm sowing thousands of sunflower seeds in the fields, photographing the flowers in the September sunshine, drying them in the studio and then using them as raw materials for the work. In turn, the sunflowers have become trees of life in the most recent self-portraits; by taking root directly in the artist’s belly, they have also served in incredible cosmogonies where each black seed symbolizes the stars of a learned solar system.”
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES TO READ AND TO WATCH
Youtube, Louisiana Channel – Anselm Kiefer Interview: Art is Spiritual (2015)
Youtube, Royal Academy of Arts – Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Tim Marlow (2014)
Youtube, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – Anselm Kiefer: History is a clay (2019)
Judith Benhamou-Huet Reports – The Confessions of Anselm Kiefer, the Star of Painting
The Guardian – Anselm Kiefer: ‘When I make a truly great painting, then I feel real’ (2019)