German painter Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württemberg. He initially studied law and Romance languages and literature, before turning to art at the Freiburg im Breisgau and Karlsruhe art schools. After working in Buchen, Baden-Württemberg, he moved to France, where he has been based in Barjac (Gard) since 1993 and in Paris since 2007.
Anselm Kiefer's work begins with a key question: how, after the Holocaust, can one be an artist in the German tradition? This existential work of remembrance has expanded into a spiritual quest nourished by the great myths and Kabbalistic mysticism. Steeped in culture, he combines painting, photography, books and sculpture. Fascinated by Judaism, Anselm Kiefer has, throughout his work, explored the theme of the Kabbalah with the same insistence as that of Germanness.
His works are included in the collections of the world's leading museums. In October 2007, three of them(Athanor, an eleven-meter-high painting, Danaë and Hortus conclusus, two sculptures) entered the collections of the Musée du Louvre. Anselm Kiefer inaugurated the Monumenta program at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2007, with a work that paid tribute to poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, as well as to Céline.
In 2009, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Opéra Bastille, the institution commissioned Kiefer to design a musical with narrator entitled Am Anfang, for which he created the concept, staging, sets and costumes based on biblical texts from the Old Testament.
Anselm Kiefer received the prestigious Praemium Imperial Prize in Tokyo in 1999, and was elected winner of the German Booksellers' and Publishers' Peace Prize for 2008.
