Anselm Kiefer. Retrospective As Testament to the Regenerative Power of Art

The exhibition on Anselm Kiefer's most representative works can be visited at the Pompidou Centre until the 18th April 2016. Anselm Kiefer (Donaueschingen, 1945) belongs to a generation of artists (as Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Jorg Immendorff) which in the 1970s promoted, with a neo-expressionist style, the revival of the German painting field. Up to this point of his career, Kiefer will specialize in representing myths of the Germanic culture. This approach to historical representation responds to the dilemma about the nature of art in a post-Nazi context: "How to create after Hitler?"

In the 1980s, Kiefer inserted in his historical paintings a sense of melancholy and mourning for the loss of Yiddish culture after the Holocaust in the German cultural scene. It is from this turning point that the artist studies and is inspired by elements of the Jewish tradition, leading to a greater complexity in his works, increasingly away from the established Western figuration. Another significant influence on Kiefer's composition is the polyhedron of Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melancholia" (1514). However, his melancholy is expressed in a more sensory and material , as it uses the ruin as a compositional principle.