Anselm Kiefer – Wasserfarben | Watercolours

Published by Heiner Bastian, with a foreword by Christian Ring and texts by Peter-Klaus Schuster and Heiner Bastian, the book comprises 104 pages and 33 colour plates.

Twenty-seven years after an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, dedicated to Anselm Kiefer’s Works on paper, this book now accompanies an exhibition at the Nolde Museum, Seebüll, presenting a significant selection of Watercolors spanning several decades.

A pictorial world unfolds from the artist’s beginnings along his path to the present—long before his international fame was established. The depicted motifs engage with recent German history, songs, legends and myths, literature from the Romantic period, and philosophical questions that Kiefer explored in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Bloch’s The Principle of Hope.

Above all these dialogues stands the ongoing conversation that Kiefer maintains with both ancient and modern poetry. On the occasion of being awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2008, the artist remarked that “poems are the world.”

Heiner Bastian, the editor of this book, dedicated himself to Kiefer’s work early on and is regarded as one of its most insightful interpreters.

Peter-Klaus Schuster, art historian, exhibition curator, and museum director, was from 1999 to 2008 the General Director of the National Museums in Berlin and simultaneously Director of the National Gallery.

Christian Ring has been the Director of the Ada and Emil Nolde Foundation Seebüll since 2013.

Text in only German.