Anselm Kiefer: Early Works Catalogue

Pre-Order the new exhibition catalogue Anselm Kiefer: Early Works

To be shipped early February

This book accompanies a major exhibition in the Ashmolean Museum on the early work of internationally acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer. 

It focuses on his paintings, drawings, photographs, woodcuts, and artist books created between 1969 and 1982, in the Hall Collection. Anselm Kiefer: Early Works is the first institutional show and publication in the UK dedicated to Kiefer’s early practice.

The book introduces themes, subjects and styles that have become signature to Kiefer’s work, while providing a more intimate and complementary context for his large-scale installations that he is best known for today. The early works are accompanied by three recent paintings from the artist’s own collections, chosen by the artist himself.

Art historians, artists, curators and experts of Kiefer’s art from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Britain and the US have contributed 46 original texts on individual works, organised in a chronological structure. An illustrated chronology at the end of the book provides an overview of the artist’s early practice and life.

The book begins with Kiefer’s iconic Occupations series, created in 1969, which Kiefer views as his first serious work. As part of the denazification of Germany, Nazi symbols and gestures, including the Sieg Heil salute, had been banned when the young art student staged a series of performances in his studio and historically significant European locations in which he raised his right arm. Only 24-years old, he bravely role-played his predecessors, asking himself and the viewers of his works uncomfortable questions. What did you do during the war? What would you have done, if you had been born twenty years earlier? Can you be certain that you would not have been seduced and infiltrated by the Nazi ideology? Kiefer was among the first generation of German post-war artists to directly confront the country’s troubled past and identity. Full of complex references to German socio-political history but also to culture, literature and his personal life, Kiefer’s early works carry a unique iconography, linking classic ideas of great art with a distinctive understanding of concrete artistic materiality.