Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer is one of the post-war period's greatest and most famous German artists, and for many years he has enjoyed a central place in Louisiana's collection. Now with great pride and joy Louisiana presents a major exhibition featuring works from four decades from Kiefer's outstanding artistic voyage.

Anselm Kiefer has long been on the list of post-war artists that Louisiana would like to show in the large, perspectivizing format. There are many good reasons for this: Kiefer is well represented in Louisiana’s collection, and his works are unconditionally among the visitors’ favourites. This is the first major showing of this important artis in Scandinavia and at the same time forms a grand finale in Louisiana’s showings of the post-war German ‘gang of four’: Polke, Richter, Baselitz and now Kiefer.

A central theme of the exhibition is found in the artist’s particular insistence on the relevance of grand narratives. Anselm Kiefer (born 1945) uses myths that to a considerable extent absorb classical material, but which must be called both the myths of the age and his own myths, often with a starting point in the artist’s own traumatized nationality.

Kiefer represents one of the most striking new departures in post-war Germany, and it is this activity over four decades that the museum wants to bring out – not as a narrow chronological development, but as five loosely demarcated themes, each of which clarifies artistic concerns to which Kiefer’s works offer central contributions: New Works, Landscape as Myth, World Time – Life Time,  Iconoclasm and The Book.

The exhibition presents around 90 works ranging from the earliest years after the Academy of Art in Karlsruhe in 1969 and all the way up until today, showing brand new pictures by Kiefer, who in 2008 was honoured with “Der Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels” (The Peace Prize of the German Booksellers), which was thus awarded for the first time to a visual artist.

Film in the Louisiana Cinema:  A brand new film about Anselm Kiefer with the title “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” is shown in the museum cinema. The film is by Sophie Fiennes and was shown to great acclaim outside the competition at this year’s Cannes Festival. The film documents Kiefer’s working processes and can be experienced as a personal journey into the universe that Kiefer has built up since 2000 in the mountains in the south of France.
Duration: 130 min. Producer: Amoeba Film, Kasander, Schiapode.

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KünstlerInnen:  Anselm Kiefer