Anselm Kiefer
German · 1945–
German painter and sculptor whose monumental, material-encrusted canvases confront the ruins of German history, the weight of mythology, and art as a means of confrontation with catastrophe rather than consolation.
Wikipedia ↗“Man kann in Deutschland keine schöne Landschaft malen. Jedes Feld ist ein Friedhof.”
German
“You cannot paint a beautiful landscape in Germany. Every field is a graveyard, every forest a hiding place, every railway line a route to the camps. The landscape is contaminated — and it is this contamination that I paint.”
“Das Buch ist die wichtigste Form in meinem Werk, wichtiger als die Malerei.”
German
“The book is the most important form in my work, more than painting. A book has layers — you turn a page and something is hidden, something is revealed. History works the same way. You think you have reached the truth, then you turn another page.”
“Ich benutze Blei, weil Blei das Material der Melancholie ist, des Saturns, der Alchemisten.”
German
“I use lead because lead is the material of melancholy, of Saturn, of the alchemists who tried to turn base matter into gold. My work reverses the process: I turn the gold of history into its true substance — ashes, rubble, the residue of what was burned.”
“Kunst reproduziert nicht das Sichtbare. Sie macht die Wunde sichtbar.”
German
“Art does not reproduce the visible. It makes visible the wound. Every painting I make is an excavation — I dig through layers of ash, lead, and straw to reach something that Germany buried but that refuses to stay underground.”
“Ruinen sind nicht das Ende der Kultur. Sie sind ihre ehrlichste Form.”
German
“Ruins are not the end of culture. They are its most honest form. A ruin tells the truth that a monument conceals: that everything built by human hands will be reclaimed by time, and that the grandest ambitions leave behind only rubble and silence.”