Extended through September 1, 2017
Works Exhibited
About
What interests me is the transformation, not the monument. I don’t construct ruins, but I feel ruins are moments when things show themselves. A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is the moment when things can start again.
—Anselm Kiefer
Gagosian is pleased to present new paintings, artists’s books, and watercolors by Anselm Kiefer.
Employing broad-ranging and erudite literary sources, from the Old and New Testaments to the poetry of Paul Celan, Kiefer’s oeuvre makes palpable the movement and destruction of human life and, at the same time, the persistence of the delicate, lyrical, or divine.
Central to the exhibition are more than forty unique artists’s books, their pages painted with gesso to mimic marble, displayed in an installation of glass vitrines. Erotically charged female nudes and faces emerge from the pages. Artists’s books are an integral part of Kiefer’s oeuvre; over time they have ranged in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and in materials, from lead to dried plant matter. In this selection of books, the sequences of narrative information and visual effect evoke the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual through the female figures on the marbled pages. They are a reminder perhaps of the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, and even of Michelangelo’s belief that his figures were “freed” from the stone with which he worked.
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Transition from Cool to Warm
Art historian James Lawrence explores Anselm Kiefer’s latest body of work.
In Conversation
Anselm Kiefer and Michael Govan
On the occasion of his exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Exodus at Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the artist spoke with Michael Govan about his works that elaborate on themes of loss, history, and redemption.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2022
The Winter 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) on its cover.
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Anselm Kiefer
In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents make a selection from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the fourth installment, we are honored to present the artist Anselm Kiefer.
Anselm Kiefer: Architect of Landscape and Cosmology
Jérôme Sans visits La Ribaute in Barjac, France, the vast studio-estate transformed by Anselm Kiefer over the course of decades. The labyrinthine site, now open to the public, stands as a total work of art, reflecting through its grounds, pavilions, and passageways major themes in Kiefer’s oeuvre: regeneration, mythology, memory, and more.
La Ribaute: Transitive, It Transforms
Camille Morineau writes of the triumph of the feminine at Anselm Kiefer’s former studio-estate in Barjac, France, describing the site and its installations as a demonstration of women’s power, a meditation on inversion and permeability, and a reversal of the long invisibility of women in history and myth.
News
Artist Spotlight
Anselm Kiefer
June 22–28, 2022
Anselm Kiefer’s monumental body of work represents a microcosm of collective memory, visually encapsulating a broad range of cultural, literary, and philosophical allusions. Drawing from sources that range from the Old and New Testaments, Kabbalah mysticism, Norse mythology, and Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Kiefer makes palpable the complexities of human history.
Photo: Georges Poncet
Online Reading
Anselm Kiefer
Transition from Cool to Warm
Anselm Kiefer: Transition from Cool to Warm is available for online reading from May 31 through July 1 as part of the From the Library series. The catalogue documents the artist’s exhibition at Gagosian New York in 2017. Central to this publication are more than forty watercolors made between 2012 and 2016, marking Kiefer’s return to the medium after forty years. The exhibition also featured over forty unique artist books and nine monumental landscape paintings, which are included in the catalogue. Essays by novelist Karl Ove Knausgård and art historian James Lawrence are included, along with an interview by art journalist Louisa Buck and the artist.
Anselm Kiefer: Transition from Cool to Warm (New York: Gagosian, 2017)
