ANSELM KIEFER
28 March - 3 September 2007 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao www.guggenheimbilbao.com
fig.: The Women of the Revolution, 1992. Lead beds.
Installation view at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London. Collection of the artist

Anselm Kiefer is represented with over 100 works from the last ten years. You will find in this exhibition some magnificent examples of German Neo-Expressionist art. Kiefer has worked with a range of mystical and mythological themes in order to portray the past and the course of history. His art is provocative, occasionally controversial. Kiefer poses questions about historical memory and human experience. Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, in southern Germany, in 1945. His earliest works date from the late 1960s. In 1966 he abandoned his law studies to devote himself to his true calling: art. His works from the 1970s and 80s focused on mythology, history, religion, and German symbolism.
Kiefer reacts with his art against the collective amnesia about the brutalities and tragic history of a Germany dismembered by World War II that struggles to restore its identity. The kabbalah, the Nibelungs, Adolf Hitler, Richard Wagner, and Nazi’s architect, Albert Speer, are usual references in the works produced in this period, considered as a genuine “theater of memory.” next>>>