ANSELM KIEFER

7. 10. 2011 — 5. 2. 2012

The exhibition at the Museum Frieder Burda is Anselm Kiefer’s first in his former home state of Baden-Württemberg since he moved to France. Anselm Kiefer is regarded as one of the most important national and international artists of our time. Born in Donaueschingen in 1945, he spent his school years in Rastatt, where today a monumental installation of his woodcuts can be seen in the municipal gallery Fruchthalle. He studied fine arts at the academies of Freiburg, Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf. From 1993 to 2006, he lived and worked in Barjac, in the Gard department of southern France. Since 2007, Anselm Kiefer has been based in Paris, where he was appointed professor at the Collège de France in 2010. In 1999, he was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo. In 2008, he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

A selection of works from the Hans Grothe collection will be presented: 33 large-format images from 30 years, with a focus on the last decade. For the first time, the work Essence from the current series of Alpine Landscapes will be presented to the public. The link to the Museum Frieder Burda is established by the work Böhmen liegt am Meer (1995), which has been in the Frieder Burda Collection for many years.

The exhibition focuses on the monumental painting The Fertile Crescent (460 x 760 cm), a 2010 work that refers to the fusion of East and West and is being shown in Germany for the first time. Kiefer’s theme here is the Tower of Babel and the cradle of our culture in fertile Mesopotamia. The Tower has divided religions and languages, but Kiefer believes in what was originally unifying: The foundations are no longer simply destroyed, they are rebuilt. The ancient forces of the fertile land can be revived, and the cohesion of different cultures is possible.

The works selected for the exhibition do not focus on the re-evaluation of the German past, which is often presented in a characteristic manner. The curator Walter Smerling explains that Judeo-Christian mythological themes dominate. The pathos often depicted in Kiefer’s works also seems strangely broken, inward-looking and neutralized. The collection is impressive without being overwhelming, and invites analytical reflection. From the outset, Kiefer’s pictorial work has oscillated between abstraction and figuration. Symbolic compounds are created from lead, concrete, dried plants, glass, barbed wire and other heterogeneous materials. Numerous pasty layers of restrained color give the surface of the painting a raised structure, giving it an almost sculptural plasticity.

Hans Grothe did not part with the works of Anselm Kiefer, even after the sale of his extensive art collection. He acquired his first Kiefer paintings out of sheer fascination and emotion, because they were initially difficult for him to grasp in terms of content and rationality. The collection contains works spanning three decades, which tirelessly fascinate by their unique materiality, rigorous density of expression and auratic intensity, which is particularly evident in the juxtaposition of the works.

The exhibition was created in close cooperation between the Museum Frieder Burda and the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur e.V. Bonn.