Anselm Kiefer – Bilder Paintings

The present monograph, edited by Heiner Bastian, is a first publication that collects the most significant paintings by Anselm Kiefer, executed between 1970 and 2017. The selection of more than a hundred works is based on Heiner Bastian’s comprehensive knowledge of the artist’s œuvre. He has also written the profound text on the paintings.

Anselm Kiefer’s visual world begins with philosophical and existential questions that address the precedent character of the gruesome symptoms of inhumanity and abnormality in German history, the world in which he was born. More than an entire decade the presence of German barbarism, its mythic and metaphysical dimension is Kiefer’s topos, the reflection of his works.

Only gradually do the artist’s paintings gain an open dialogue between poetry and physics, the world of the Judeo-Christian cult, the philosophical question of meaning, of dogma and guilt, and the invisible realm of the wondrous when it reaches the world of the phantastic and Walter Benjamin’s »profane enlightenment«.

Today we consider Anselm Kiefer doubtlessly as the most relevant mythograph, the poetic painter of our time. His demiurgeous work dismisses the unquestioned aesthetic of artistic achievements. Instead it seeks the imaginary, inexplicable and deeply mystical world, mystical spheres.