Anselm Kiefer“Wooden Room”

Anselm Kiefer

• Anselm Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württemburg, Germany, and raised near the east bank of the Rhine in the region of the Black Forest. Kiefer was named after the nineteenth-century classical painter Anselm Feuerbach and planned from childhood to become an artist. After studies at the university in Freiburg and the academy in Karlsruhe, he studied informally in the early 1970s with the artist Joseph Beuys on occasional visits to Düsseldorf. Before moving to Barjac, in the Languedoc region in the south of France, in 1992, Kiefer made art at home in Hornbach and then in a large converted brick factory in Buchen. He recently moved from the south of France to Paris.

Educational background

Father was an art educator.

Anselm Kiefer studied law in 1965, before he began his career as artist to find the connections between history, philosophy, and religion; however, he had always been interested in art.

Studied art informally under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early 1970s.

Joseph beuys

• Joseph Beuys (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs]; May 12, 1921 – January 23, 1986) was a German Fluxus, Happening and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.

• His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate, but he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century.

works

•The great majority of Kiefer's works since his emergence in the late 1960s through the 1990s refer to subjects drawn from Germany and its culture: German history, myth, literature, art history, music, philosophy, topography, architecture, and folk customs, even going so far as to exploit clichés or commonplace icons.

everyone stands under his own dome

Occupations

• “The Nazi occupations had consequences for all of us for many years. Some people will always remain occupied by it.”

• “a real working through of German history. You have to inhabit it to overcome it.”

Attic series

• A attic of a former schoolhouse. Located in Hornbach, a remote village in the Oden Forest, the wooden schoolhouse appealed to Kiefer as, in his words, “a place to teach myself history.”

• In Kiefer’s Attic series of the early 1970s, to which Resurrexit belongs, the artist choreographed various events, historical propositions, and philosophical dilemmas using his wooden studio as a stage upon which different symbols and personas play out the drama.

books & architecture