Anselm Kiefer's painting are politically loaded, highly tactile, and hefty objects which are highly distinctive, with their sombre colouration and repeated references to German insignia, state architecture, heroic busts, and 'scorched earth' or forested vistas.
Read MoreKiefer's artworks display an obsession with German culture: its antecedents and moral consequences, its historic accountability for following generations, and the fight against the erasure of memory. The paintings' scale, raw physicality, and sense of timelessness draw the viewer in, attempting to totally immerse them in the historic and ethical consequences of the Third Reich.
These unrelentingly symbolic images—such as To the Unknown Painter (1983), with its depiction of the courtyard of Hitler's Chancellery, or Shulamite (1983), with its huge rendered Wilhelm Kreis memorial, the Soldatenhalle in Berlin—all steeped in German history and now European catastrophe, make Kiefer instantly identifiable.
In more recent years, the subjects addressed in Kiefer's artworks have expanded to include non-German-specific themes like Norse legends, the occult, string theory, astronomy, and with watercolour: delicate pink flowers and female nudes. In Keifer's For Velimir Khlebnikov: The Doctrine of War: Battles (2004–2010), with its attached lead submarine centrally positioned, the artist salutes the great experimental Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov, someone Kiefer obviously regards as an innovative kindred spirit, and who wrote poems predicting sea battles.
Anselm Kiefer's sculpture Uraeus (2020) was his first U.S. commissioned public sculpture, and comprises a large open lead book resting on a 'podium' of 30-feet-wide, open eagle wings at the Rockefeller Centre. It is supported on a 20-foot-high stainless steel pole, up which advances a coiled lead serpent. Like attracts like.
