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ANSELM KIEFER
FÜR WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE
On VIEW AT OUR SALZBURG GALLERY AND AS AN ONLINE VIEWING EXPERIENCE
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"The pictures were painted in Barjac, in the south of France [...] The grass, the entire vegetation was so dried out that the light yellow stalks and the withered thistles made for a whole variety of ochre and yellow shades which delighted me; which, in their beauty on the verge of decay, reminded me of the Grim Reaper, Eros and Thanatos. As I walked through the glowing fields, I kept thinking of Walther von der Vogelweide – his love-songs, his poems, so closely bound up with his life." – Anselm Kiefer
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"For me, poems are like buoys in an ocean. I swim from one to another, without them I am without direction, I am lost."
– Anselm Kiefer
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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‘I always feel in conflict with my pictures, since I always have to wage war in my head between the world I’m supposed to be creating and the earth that closes itself against me. If I don’t accept that, then I run the risk of making affirmative products.’
Anselm Kiefer lives and works between Paris and Barjac, France. The artist studied law, literature and linguistics before attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, and later in Düsseldorf, where he was a student of Joseph Beuys.
Anselm Kiefer was selected for the West German Pavilion at the 39th Venice Biennale in 1980 and, more recently, his works have been shown in prominent solo exhibitions internationally, including Fondation Jan Michalski, Montricher (2019); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2019); Met Breuer, New York (2018); Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2017); State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2017); Musée Rodin, Paris (2017); Albertina, Vienna (2016); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015); and Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014). In 2018, Anselm Kiefer's site-specific sculpture Uraeus was publicly exhibited in front of the Rockefeller Center in New York.
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Anselm Kiefer’s (b. 1945, Donaueschingen, Germany) ongoing preoccupation with cultural memory, identity and history lends his works their multi-layered subject-matter, fuelled by a variety of historical, mythological and literary sources. These include references to Greek mythology, alchemy, and Christian symbolism, as well as the writings of celebrated medieval lyricist Walther von der Vogelweide, nineteenth-century French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, and Austrian post-war poet Ingeborg Bachmann, among others.
While many of his works can be interpreted in the context of fraught German identity in the post-war era, Anselm Kiefer’s preoccupation with myth and memorialisation encompasses the full sweep of human history. This is expressed not only thematically, but also on the level of form itself, through his treatment of materials and use of texture. The artist’s choice of highly symbolic materials includes lead, concrete, dried plants, glass, barbed wire, earth and other organic elements, alongside found objects. The dense tactility of his layered materials suggest the accumulations of history, year upon year, strata upon strata, with weathered surfaces that seem to reflect the ravages of passing time.
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