Anselm Kiefer | Exhibition

Description

Anselm Kiefer
April 29 - October 25, 2026

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany. In 1992, he moved to France, where he lives and works between Paris and Barjac, near Avignon. The artist studied Law, Literature, and Linguistics before enrolling at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts, and later at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he was a student of Joseph Beuys.

In 1980, he was selected to represent the West German Pavilion at the 39th Venice Biennale, and since then his works have been shown in prominent international solo exhibitions at prestigious museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago (1987); the Nationalgalerie Berlin (1991); the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998); the Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001); and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2007). The Royal Academy of Arts in London (2014); the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2015); the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (2015); the Albertina in Vienna (2016); the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (2017); the Rodin Museum in Paris (2017); and the Met Breuer in New York (2018); among many others.

Kiefer received the Praemium Imperiale from Japan in 1999, and in 2008 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 2007, he became the first artist since Georges Braque to be commissioned for a permanent installation at the Louvre Museum in Paris, and in 2018 his site-specific sculpture Uraeus was displayed in front of Rockefeller Center in New York. In 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned Anselm Kiefer to create a permanent installation for the Pantheon in Paris.

Works
Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer addresses the complex events of history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos. His work encompasses paintings, display cases, installations, artist's books, and a wide variety of works on paper, including drawings, watercolors, collages, and manipulated photographs. He also uses materials as diverse as lead, cement, glass, pieces of fabric, tree roots, and burned books.

The temporary exhibition at the CAHH will occupy six of its rooms. Currently, three large-scale works by Kiefer, part of the permanent collection, can be seen in the main hall. Two of these works, Böse Blumen (2012-2016) and Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) (2018), include a characteristic lead book that appears in many of Kiefer's works. The third work in the collection, Walhalla (2015-2017), also features another characteristic of Kiefer's practice: the pouring of lead over paintings depicting landscapes.