"Once you make a painting, everything becomes beautiful."
Anselm Kiefer is a German artist who explores the identity, history, and mythology of his country in the postwar period. He thus aligns himself against the erasure of the recent past, drawing on banned icons of the Third Reich, such as the swastika, sheaves of wheat, "Stuka" bombers, etc., intending to demonstrate that Nazism is part of the country’s history. A painter, sculptor, and installation artist, Kiefer uses a range of essential materials in his work. His large-scale paintings are profoundly textured, given the application of paint mixed with organic substances and metal. This mixture – the addition of lead in particular – has symbolic significance, making tangible the movement and destruction of human life, as well as the persistence of the lyric and the divine.