Anselm Kiefer: Salt of the Earth

Description

Over the past four decades, Anselm Kiefer has produced a diverse body of work in painting, sculpture, and installation that has made him among the most important artists of his generation. 

His subject matter includes sources as diverse as Teutonic mythology and history, alchemy, and the nature of belief, all depicted in a bewildering variety of materials, including oil paint, dirt, lead, models, photographs, woodcuts, sand, straw, and all manner of organic material. By adding found materials to the painted surface of his immense tableaux, he invents a compelling third space between painting and sculpture. 

With more than 400 color images of the artist’s works, this catalog presents works which have rarely shown in public and his most recent works.

It includes critical essays, an interview with the artist, and a chronology detailing his long career. 

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Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory

Description

Through Celan's linguistic innovations and Kiefer's intense exploration of past and present, artistic creation becomes both an expression of horror and an act of commemoration.

The art of Anselm Kiefer is rich with references to writers, philosophers, and poets, and his relationship with Paul Celan has been the most complex and intense of these dialogues with the past. Celan's poetry, inextricably linked with the memory of the Holocaust, has haunted Kiefer's work for more than twenty-five years and has influenced him on every level, from the naming of works and exhibitions to the incorporation of symbolic materials from Celan's imagery—sand, straw, hair, and ashes—into his paintings.

Like other German artists of his generation, Kiefer began by questioning his own artistic heritage, focusing on the iconographic and mythological elements of German culture that had been taken over by Nazi propaganda, and subsequently repressed and buried deep in the collective unconscious. It was his encounter with Celan's work in the early 1980s that first enabled him to escape from the vicious circle of fascination and disgust at the cultural ties that bound him to the Third Reich, leading him to confront the subject of the Holocaust and Jewish memory as a whole and to embrace this body of traditions within his art.

Magnificently illustrated throughout with reproductions of Kiefer's best-known works, this book explores the intricate web of associations between the poet and the painter, a network that is extended to embrace other artistic and literary figures such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Joseph Beuys. 157 illustrations, 140 in color.

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Anselm Kiefer

Description

The innovation of Anselm Kiefer's majestic art has been to combine history painting's grandeur of scale and concept with Abstract Expressionism's emphatic materiality and worked surface. This unusual combination has made for works of Wagnerian ambition, as Kiefer draws on German history, literature and mythology to attack what Herfried Münkler, writing in the Louisiana Museum's new Kiefer monograph, describes as a uniquely German bourgeois yearning for "clear patterns of behavior defined by virtues and values." The tragic dimensions of this yearning bestow upon Kiefer's post-Holocaust canvases an immense gravity, conveyed through a sober, murky palette and scrawled poetical inscriptions. Kiefer often burns materials, or adds sand, to embellish this mood of weathered decay. This new monograph surveys works from the beginning of Kiefer's career in the late 1960s (including spreads of his early book works) to 2010.

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Writing about one of the most important and complex artists of our times requires the erudition, clarity, and broad view of a Daniel Arasse, author of the gorgeously illustrated Anselm Kiefer. Avoiding a straightforward chronological survey, Arasse plunges directly into Kiefer's major themes and the ways they reflect the artist's subtly evolving perspectives on German history, the role of the artist, and the meaning of life. Arasse illuminates Kiefer's use of Jewish kabbalistic symbolism, his relationship to philosophers and writers from Nietzsche to Celan, and the rich trove of metaphor to be found in his use of lead, straw, books, and images of railroad tracks and artists' palettes. Never succumbing to art-speak, Arasse--whose French text has been deftly translated into English--marshals his arguments with lucid elegance. The approximately 400 full-color plates, including full views and close-ups, are magnificent. This is surely one of the major art books of our time. --Cathy Curtis

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Anselm Kiefer Heaven and Earth

Description

A retrospective volume of Anselm Kiefer's work, this catalogue addresses the artist's entire career through the lens of one compelling theme. From his earliest sculptures to his recent highly textured paintings, Anselm Kiefer has woven themes of heaven and earth into his work, exploring the polarities of these ideas while struggling to define the transcendent quality that places art squarely in between. Destruction and rebirth, glory and shame, sin and redemption all figure prominently in Kiefer's often controversial depictions of Germany's physical and cultural landscape. This catalogue of more than sixty reproductions includes Kiefer's first work, "Heaven", as well as numerous other rare early works. It features brand new, previously unpublished watercolours produced specifically for the publication as well as an interview with the artist.

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Anselm Kiefer: Next Year in Jerusalem

Description

This book imaginatively evokes one of Anselm Kiefer's most significant exhibitions with magnificent reproductions of a provocative body of work representing his key themes, styles, and mediums. Employing a dazzling variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, and photography, Kiefer's monumental installation, captured in this sumptuous oversize volume, manifests an array of cultural myths and metaphors, from the Old and New Testaments to the Kabbalah, from ancient Roman history to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Célan. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history, the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos, and the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual amid the ongoing destruction of the world. The illustrations in the book are preceded by a thoughtful text by the novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner, and the book concludes with a translation of Kiefer's acceptance speech for the 2008 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a summation of his thought as artist and citizen.

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Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba

Description

In the chaos of Milan's swiftly-converting industrial quarter, one massive space has been set aside for contemporary art. Merkaba documents Hangar Bicocca's first installation, the seven title towers, from the prototype stage to installation by cranes and pulleys to the spotlight. Each precarious-looking spire of cement and lead boxes has a name of its own as well. "Falling Stars," "Sternenlager," "Die Sefiroth," "Tzim-Tzum," "Shevirat Ha-Kelim," "Tiqqun" and "The Seven Heavenly Palaces." Their towering silhouettes, some as many as 50 feet high, are as mystical as their titles suggest, but they also seem to make reference to all that is changing and staying the same in the city where they stand, home both to early sacred and secular towers and contemporary skyscrapers. Kiefer, known best for his reckonings with German history, proves that he can work the same alchemy elsewhere.

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