A unique artistic approach to recollection and memory, transience and forgetting

“In my pictures I tell stories to show what is behind the story. I open up a hole and I go through it,” so states artist Anselm Kiefer. Considered one of the most significant artists of the present day, he is in spotlight thanks to a major exhibition series at the Essl Museum in Vienna.

A new solo personally furnished by the collector Karlheinz Essl is on show, with 15 works, among them four new main works from the artist’s latest creative period. Agnes and Karlheinz Essl have been exploring the work of the great German artist for many years and have repeatedly visited him in his studio.

In the last ten years the collector couple has acquired a large number of important works. The exhibition grants a very personal collector’s view of the artist; for the first time all of Kiefer’s works in the Essl collection will be made accessible to a wide audience.

The works in the exhibition, as a press release elaborates, reflect various important, fundamental themes of the artist. The monumental work Horologium (Shooting Stars) comes at the beginning of the collecting activity and – together with the Skulptur mit Sternen – leads one to think of the cosmos or the cosmic dimension of our existence. Für Paul Celan refers to Celan’s poem Die Todesfuge (Death Fugue), to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

For Anselm Kiefer (born in Donaueschingen, Germany, in 1945) the approach to recollection, memory, and particularly also to transience and forgetting, plays a very important role. With his often extensive works, he aims to make time tangible. The large-format, anti-heroic images of nature and histories, with decaying monuments, run down spots and morbid landscapes show a present that has been corroded, ravaged by the past. Against the emptiness Kiefer sets names in awkward handwriting, names of places, of gods, of people, occasionally whole lines of poetry, such as by Ingeborg Bachmann or Paul Celan.

Kiefer refers to literary texts in the new works, too. In the material pictures, Kiefer uses sand, earth, lime, ash, hair, seeds, wire, branches coated in plaster or also textiles. Organic materials as well as the crusty and the crumbling in painting symbolize the fact that a work of art, too, is transient, that change and decay are an inherent part of life.