Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer was born on 8 March 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, in the final weeks of the Second World War — a biographical circumstance that has shaped the moral and historical preoccupations of his entire practice. He initially studied law and Romance languages before turning to art, training in Freiburg and Karlsruhe under Peter Dreher and subsequently at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where his encounter with Joseph Beuys proved formative. Since 1993 he has lived and worked in France, though Germany's unresolved relationship with its own past has remained the gravitational center of his work across six decades.

Kiefer's art confronts history, myth, and memory through an insistently material language — lead, straw, ash, emulsion, and earth accumulate on surfaces that feel less painted than excavated. Among his most significant works, Shulamith (1983), held at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, draws on Paul Celan's poetry and the monumental architecture of German fascism to mourn the destruction of European Jewry. His earlier photographic series Besetzungen (Occupations) (1969), in which he performed the Nazi salute at sites across Europe, established from the outset his willingness to stage provocation as a form of cultural reckoning — forcing into visibility what postwar German society preferred to suppress. Critics writing in EL PAÍS, La Vanguardia, and Jot Down have described his practice in terms of ruins transmuted into gold, of monumental melancholy, and of an art that converts memory into physical weight.

The scope of institutional recognition Kiefer has received reflects his standing across multiple generations of critical and scholarly attention. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association in 1999, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2008, the J. Paul Getty Medal in 2017, the Prize for Understanding and Tolerance from the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2019, and the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize for the Arts from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 2023. His work enters public collections including the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Kiefer is represented primarily by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac and Gagosian, with additional project-based relationships with Galerie Bastian in Berlin and Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples and Milan. His exhibition activity in recent years has been sustained and wide-ranging: solo presentations have included Punctum and Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still at Gagosian New York (2024 and 2026), Mein Rhein at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg (2024), Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (2025), Wasserfarben at Galerie Bastian in Berlin (2025), and I wish to die in autumn moonlight even in darkness not to be lost at Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan (2026). Five monumental paintings from Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea — described as his first American retrospective in more than twenty years — remain on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum through spring 2027. Further exhibition activity is scheduled at White Cube Bermondsey in London from November 2026 through January 2027, and at MASS MoCA beginning May 2026 under the Hall Art Foundation. The year 2025 marked both his eightieth year and the sixtieth anniversary span of a career that shows no sign of contraction.