To close its birthday season, the Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne is presenting an exhibition devoted to one of Germany’s greatest visual artists, Anselm Kiefer. Born in Germany two months before the Nazi capitulation, Kiefer has continued to summon up memories of the Second World War in his work, in cathartic fashion.
Internationally known and recognised for his monumental pieces and work on European memory, he will be presenting over a hundred and thirty works at the LaM, bearing witness to his practice as a photographer and the question of what images reveal, essential in his body of work but scarcely touched upon in previous exhibitions.
Anselm Kiefer, Untitled, 2014. Silver and mixed technical emulsion in photography; 103.5 x 160.5 cm. Photo by Charles Duprat.
Photography at the Beginning
Permeated by the ravaged landscapes of his childhood, in the late 1960s Anselm Kiefer’s body of work turned its focus to reflections on the origin of Evil and intimate exploration of the tragic nature of Nazism. This focus led to a major series of actions.
The themes addressed in his work, underpinned by his wide knowledge of literature and with a basis in German history, cover a great many areas, from mythology to architecture by way of destruction, alchemy and geophysics.
Although he asserts that he thinks in images and always uses photography to create his paintings, up until now, Anselm Kiefer has very rarely or only partially presented this essential component of his work. The exhibition at the LaM is the first to take stock of his photographic practice, which has always been his career’s discreet companion.
Anselm Kiefer, The Secret Life of Plants (La Vie secrète des plantes), 1998. Photographic reproductions, plants, graphite; 64.50 x 50 cm. Photo by Charles Duprat.
Photography is of key importance in the construction of Anselm Kiefer’s process and approach. His first creations from in and around 1969 bear witness to the fact: photographs of the cathartic rituals to which he subjected himself, dressed in the Wehrmacht officer’s uniform his father had worn and making the Nazi salute on various symbolic sites in Italy, Switzerland and the south of France.
Likewise, most of the hundreds of unique books that he has created include photographs that have been glued, painted, erased, burnt, scribbled on, stained or “engineered” in one way or another. These days, all you need do is take a look inside his studio near Paris in order to understand the medium’s decisive role in Anselm Kiefer’s thought and environment. It is everywhere, in steel frames along the walls, and on the floor awaiting further processing.
In order to illustrate the full importance of photography in the artist’s body of work, the exhibition combines two viewpoints that help visitors understand how his work has evolved from the first photographs of the 1960s to the present day, gradually providing them with formats, numbers and subjects that put them on a level with his paintings. At the same time, the itinerary is divided into eight sections focusing on some of the essential chapters in his thought.
This blog post was adapted from the Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne (LaM)'s website by Catherine Couturier Gallery.