Anselm Kiefer - Albertina Director Klaus Albrecht Schröder about Kiefers Work (en) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Anselm Kiefer - Albertina Director Klaus Albrecht Schröder about Kiefers Work
Kiefer is neither a historian nor a landscape painter, history and landscape are however essential components of his pictures. Landscapes and elements of history form complex semantic fields where he reflects as an author on mythology, on German history, its figures, and their death cult.
For Kiefer, the subject of power and its fugacity is fundamental; he endeavours to reconcile worldly and spiritual power.

By means of self-knowledge’s dialectics, where the factual historical past is reconstructed -collectively and individually, subjectively and intellectually- spiritual purification is the goal of the artist. This seems to be the justification for Kiefer’s melancholic obsession with the power of art, and the power of Germany. It is an experimental set-up about the question whether if art is able to accomplish a psychological and spiritual transformation of the German ego.
By identifying with the great characters and myths of German history, the artist acknowledges that they are part of his personality; therefore artistic appropriation is recognition as well as exorcism of the ancestors and German mythology – and the pursuit of union with the father figure.

Anselm Kiefer’s forceful creativity stems from his will to power and from his acknowledgement of the power of destiny, however he transforms this typically German will to power to a claim to power on a spiritual level. (written by Cem Angeli)

Museum Albertina | www.albertina.at
A CastYourArt production | www.castyourart.com

Further episodes of CastYourArt - Watch Art Now

Further podcasts by CastYourArt.com

Website of CastYourArt.com