Anselm Kiefer

Danièle Cohn, who has worked alongside Anselm Kiefer for many years, explains the central role the artist’s studios play in his artistic process. To enter a painter’s atelier is a rare privilege and the stuff of dreams, as if access to this intimate place were the key to the very act of creation. Entering an atelier allows us to see, in situ, the creative process in action, in the present; we are admitted into the space and virtually participate in the artistic act by our very presence, rather than simply observing from the outside. In this monograph, Danièle Cohn reveals how Anselm Kiefer’s ateliers—and his organization and spatial distribution of them—are essential to his artistic activity as a painter and sculptor. While they serve as production areas and storage spaces, artists’ studios are also physical representations of the mind and memory of an artist, where living and working spaces combine. This book takes the reader on an exploration through Kiefer’s various ateliers and examines the crucial role they have in the creation of his works. From the attic of a former school or a disused brickyard in Germany, via an atelier in the rural surroundings in the south of France or the urban setting of the Marais in Paris, to his current studio on the outskirts of the French capital, we discover how Anselm Kiefer’s work spaces have impacted his art.

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) is one of the most important and controversial artists at work in the world today. Through such diverse mediums as painting, photography, artist's books, installations and sculpture, he has interpreted the great political and cultural issues at the heart of the modern European sensibility: the connections among memory, history and mythology; war; the Holocaust; and ethnic and national identity. In this extensively illustrated volume, available again in a new, compact format, Arasse analyses Kiefer's education, influences, philosophy and art, while demonstrating the unity and continuity of his work. Arasse takes as his starting point the 1980 Venice Biennale, a key moment in the artist's career that marked the birth of both his international reputation and the controversy over the 'Germanness' of his work. Organized both chronologically and according to the artist's recurrent motifs, the book's approximately 250 full-colour images trace Kiefer's creative evolution, and present his great themes in their full scope and power.

Kiefer is best known for his very large works, and this publication provides an unusually detailed look at the least-known aspect of his oeuvre, his smaller works on paper. There are fifty-four works on paper in this volume, and they cover the years from 1969 to 1993. They entered the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995. Fifty-one are in a great variety of media - watercolors, acrylics, and painted-over photographs, for example - and they are thought to represent about one-fourth of the unique works on paper that Kiefer created between 1969 and the end of the 1980s. The remaining three are very large works composed of numerous woodcuts made slightly earlier and mounted together. The entire group comprises a comprehensive sampling of Kiefer's talent for blending biting commentary and humor.

Kiefer has played a major role in shaping the landscape of post-war German, and indeed, international art. His vision encompasses philosophy, history, literature, politics, and compelling moral issues. Biro presents the most up-to-date research on this émigré German artist.

In 1974 Anselm Kiefer produced Erotik im Fernen Osten oder: Transition from Cool to Warm, a book of watercolors. Thirty years later, Gagosian Gallery’s newest catalogue marks Kiefer’s return to the medium, with works made between 2012 and 2015. More than forty unique artists’s books, their pages painted with gesso to mimic marble, can be found in the exciting new tome. Artists’s books are an integral part of Kiefer’s oeuvre; over time they have ranged in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and in materials, from lead to dried plant matter. In this selection of books, the sequences of narrative information and visual effect evoke the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual through the female figures on the marbled pages.

A groundbreaking catalogue of the largest collection of Kiefer works in North America. Anselm Kiefer ranks among the best-known post–World War II European artists. Published to coincide with a new exhibition at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and a long-term installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, this is the first survey of one of the world’s largest collections of works by Anselm Kiefer. The Hall and Hall Art Foundation collections include major Kiefer artist books, works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and large-scale installations from the late 1960s to the present day—many of which have never before been reproduced. Among the earlier treasures are Kiefer’s artist’s books, which are reproduced here in unprecedented depth and which contain in their rough directness so much of the lyricism with which he approaches scale and material complexity. With original texts by Norman Rosenthal, Bonnie Clearwater, and Joseph Thompson, this is a beautiful document of a significant collection and a definitive celebration of one of the most important artists working anywhere today.

Unlike almost any other contemporary German artist, Anselm Kiefer has rendered the horrors of recent history and created profound works of art with mythological, religious and philosophical themes. This catalogue of his woodcuts deals with more than 35 major works by the artist.