The Centre Pompidou (Paris) is offering an unprecedented exploration of Anselm Kiefer’s oeuvre. This retrospective, the first held in France in thirty years, invites the visitor to wander through ten thematic rooms covering the ensemble of the German artist’s career from the late 1960s up to the present.
The exhibition occupies 2000 sqm. and presents nearly one hundred and fifty works: sixty paintings selected among the major masterpieces, an installation, an ensemble of vitrines and works on paper as well as a few of the artist’s earliest books.
Laid out in a sequence of thematic rooms correlated with specific times and spaces, the exhibition includes an exceptional selection of Anselm Kiefer’s most emblematic paintings, landmarks in his career: works like Resurrexit (1973), Quaternität (1973), Varus (1976), Margarethe (1981) and Sulamith (1983). In 2015 the artist produced within this new project an ensemble of forty vitrines on the themes of alchemy and the Kabbalah.
Anselm Kiefer’s oeuvre, with a singular plastic and visual intensity, invites the visitor to discover several poetic, literary and philosophic worlds, ranging from the poetry of Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann or Jean Genet, to the philosophy of Heidegger, alchemical treatises, the sciences, esotericism, the Hebrew thought of the Talmud and the Kabbalah.
On entering the lobby of the Centre Pompidou visitors will be confronted with one of the monumental installations the artist made. Inside this “tower-house” a Saturnine world awaits the public. Inside the installation visitors will discover the artist’s favourite material, lead, with thousands of photographs taken by Anselm Kiefer throughout his career, and that constitute a near biographic archive. Like a memory unscrolled, these bands sustain the artist’s meditation on the two central themes of his work: time and memory.
Anselm Kiefer
16.12.2015 – 18.04.2016
Anselm Kiefer, Varus, 1976. Image courtesy of Jochen Littkemann
Anselm Kiefer, Margarethe, 1981. Image courtesy of Ian Reeves
Anselm Kiefer, Osiris und Isis, 1985 – 1987. Image courtesy of Ben Blackwell
Anselm Kiefer, Lilith, 1987 – 1990. Image courtesy of Atelier Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer, Die Orden der Nacht, 1996. Image courtesy of Atelier Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer, Sulamith, 1983. Image courtesy of Ian Reeves
Discover: www.centrepompidou.fr
