Anselm Kiefer

Résumé : This catalogue, published on the occasion of an extraordinary exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, is also an exhaustive, retrospective volume of Anselm Kiefer’s work. German artist Anselm Kiefer is one of the most important and controversial artists of the 20th century. From the time of his appearance at the 1980 Venice Biennale, through such diverse mediums as painting, photography, artist's books, installations, and sculpture, he has interpreted the great political and cultural issues at the heart of the modern European sensibility. Now his challenging, wildly expressive work receive all the space, high-quality reproductions, and fluent interpretation they demand in this superb volume. According to the artist's recurrent motifs, the book's approximately 300 full-color images trace Kiefer's creative evolution, and present his great themes in their full scope and power. The author interprets Kiefer’s art as a site where distinctions between modern and postmodern senses of representation, history, cosmology, and nature become thematic. He addresses individual works and gives the historical, biographical, art-critical, and philosophical setting for each piece.