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Sponsoring this exhibition of the work of Anselm Kiefer is a twofold satisfaction for BBVA,
in a year in which the tenth anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao coincides with
the 150th anniversary of the bank’s foundation.

Our participation in this project is the latest in our close and highly rewarding cooperation
with the museum, which began with an agreement signed back in 1997. Under the terms of
the agreement, which the bank entered into as part of its corporate responsibility policy on
contributing to the diffusion of the arts in general, BBVA became a member of the Board of
Trustees of the museum and undertook to sponsor one of the exhibitions in its annual Art
Program.

The relationship between the museum and the bank has produced a series of exhibitions of
the highest quality, including China: 5,000 Years; From Dürer to Rauschenberg: A
Quintessence of Drawing; Degas to Picasso: Painters, Sculptors and the Camera; The
Worlds of Nam June Paik; Paris: Capital of the Arts, 1900-1968; Calder: Gravity and
Grace; James Rosenquist: A Retrospective; The Aztec Empire, and, last year, Russia!

Anselm Kiefer is certainly well represented in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection,
and some of his magnificent examples of German Neo-Expressionist art have been displayed
in a number of presentations from the Permanent Collection. However, this is the first time
the museum has organized an exhibition devoted to Kiefer’s work. The present show goes
beyond the museum’s own holdings of his oeuvre to give an overview of his production in
the last decade.

In that time, Kiefer has worked with a range of mystical and mythological themes in order to
portray the past and the course of history. His provocative, occasionally controversial art
poses questions about historical memory and human experience, using a highly personal
technique which involves the use of some most unusual media, such as sand, lead, and wood,
in his paintings, books, and installations.

Visitors are unlikely to be unaffected by the mythical dimension and the monumental size of
his latest works; indeed, their sheer physical presence is only one of the many stimuli to
thought and reflection that they contain. The heroic gestures that so mark his artistic
endeavor, coupled with the development of a complex personal iconography combining
cultural, historical, religious, philosophical and mythic references, have won Kiefer deserved
international recognition.

This ambitious exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is to my mind an

excellent opportunity for visitors to see, in an ideal setting, how the work of one of the most
important creative artists of the second half of the 20th century has evolved in recent years.

Francisco González Rodríguez

Chairman, BBVA

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ANSELM KIEFER

Opening and closing dates: March 28-September 3

Curator: Germano Celant

Sponsored by: BBVA

• An anthological exhibition on the creative universe of one of the most

important artists of our time featuring works from the Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao Collection, private and public collections, as well as from
the artist’s own holdings

• Over 100 works from the last decade including a monumental painting
created specifically for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Atrium

From March 28 to September 3, 2007, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents one of the key
exhibitions in the art program for its tenth anniversary: Anselm Kiefer, a unique exhibition
featuring a selection of works created in the last decade by one of the most important and
acclaimed artists of our time. Curated by Germano Celant, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, this exhibition showcases a selection of
Kiefer’s works from private and public collections, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection,
and the artist’s own collection.

This thematic exhibition, which has been made possible thanks to the generous sponsorship of
BBVA in the year in which the Bank also celebrates its 150th anniversary, combines the
emotional power of Kiefer’s works with Frank Gehry’s building to submerge the viewer in a
unique creative space that enhances the artist’s colossal artworks. One of the exhibition’s
outstanding features is a monumental, 15-meter-high desolate winter landscape, created
specifically for the Museum Atrium, where it interacts spectacularly with Gehry’s overarching
space.

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Distributed over nine galleries on the first and second floors of the Museum, over 100 works
from the last ten years illustrate the full range of themes, inspirations, and concerns that have
defined Anselm Kiefer’s entire career, thus giving the visitor an comprehensive and
heterogeneous overview of his oeuvre to date.

From the Particular to the Universal

Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, in southern Germany, in 1945. Internationally

acclaimed as one of the leading creative figures of our time, Kiefer’s earliest works date from the
late 1960s. In 1966 he abandoned his law studies to devote himself to his true calling: art. His
works from the 1970s and 80s focused on mythology, history, religion, and German symbolism,
themes the artist explored in depth and which he recurrently uses as a reaction against the
collective amnesia about the brutalities and tragic history of a Germany dismembered by World
War II that struggles to restore its identity. The kabbalah, the Nibelungs, Adolf Hitler, Richard
Wagner, and Nazi’s architect, Albert Speer, are usual references in the works produced in this
period, considered as a genuine “theater of memory.”

In Kiefer’s works, painting, sculpture, and photography merge with collage and assemblage to
underscore the solemnity and transcendent nature of their content; their tactile quality, powerful
brushstroke, dense—almost monochrome—palette, and the use of highly unusual materials such
as lead, wire, straw, plaster, clay, ash, dust, real plants and flowers all contrast vividly with the
works’ clear meaning.

In the early 1990s, after traveling around the world, Kiefer began to explore more universal
themes still based on religion, occult symbolism, myths, and history, but more centered on the
global destiny of art and culture, and on the spirituality, mechanisms, and mysteries of the human
mind.

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Monumental Works

This exhibition is organized around themes such as religion and mysticism, philosophy, science,
nature, alchemy, as well as literature and poetry where Kiefer’s cultural references range from the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the writings
of Paul Celan (1920–1970), Jean Genet (1910–1986), and Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), to
the music of Richard Wagner (1813–1883), figures Kiefer uses to question and explore essential
aspects of human experience and condition.

The selection of works for the exhibition places special emphasis on Kiefer’s monumental
projects, i.e. works conceived for specific sites charged with historical, religious or cultural
significance, including his own studio in Barjac, thereby creating a powerful interaction with the
architecture.

In an interview with the journal Modern Painters in 2006, Kiefer stated: “My works are very
fragile, and not only in the literal sense. If you put them in the wrong circumstances, they can
lose their power completely. I didn’t want to bring them to a space. I want to give a space to the
painting.”

The five impressive canvases of the series Chevirat Ha-Kelim (2000), on display in gallery 209,
are a clear example of this statement. Created specifically for the chapel of La Salpêtrière
psychiatric hospital in Paris, the series is one of many of Kiefer’s works on the theme of the
kabbalah, a major source of inspiration for him in the last twenty years. Indeed, the works shown
here under the title Chevirat Ha-Kelim (The breaking of the vessels in Hebrew), with their upper
parts rounded into the shape of the altar, take their title directly from the kabbalah tradition that
Kiefer has found so fascinating, as in Tsim-Tsoum, Emanation or The Expansion of Sefiroth.

Also in the exhibition are works from another extraordinary series produced for a 2005 exhibition
entitled For Paul Celan, which comprises books, paintings, and sculptures. Many of these
defiantly heavy books pierced by flowers—classic symbols of both fertility and of the transitory

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nature of life—are on show at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Besides being a constant source
of inspiration for Kiefer, books have been part of his artistic production since late 1960s, both in
paper and as impressive, large-scale, unique sculptures. They are works of art to be read visually,
and which serve the artist as a vessel of wisdom and knowledge of the world, as a way to preserve
memory.

The canvases of desolate, snow-covered landscapes shown in gallery 105 belong to the same
series. Based on photographs taken by Kiefer in the fields surrounding Salzburg, Austria, they
were inspired by the early works of the Jewish Romanian poet and essayist Paul Celan, and
include explicit references to the death of Celan’s parents in the Nazi concentration camps.

Celan lived in France from 1947 until 1970, when, overwhelmed by the psychological burden of
his Holocaust-scarred life, he drowned himself in the Seine. This series of paintings slowly reveals
the enduring influence of Celan’s poems on Kiefer’s oeuvre. In thrall to Celan’s writings, Kiefer
explored themes such as violence in history, Hebrew mysticism, and the belief in the preservation
of memory as the only way through which mankind may assimilate their traumas. In these
paintings, Kiefer employs ash, straw, leaves, sand, and hair to convey the concept of materiality
implicit in Celan’s poem Death Fugue. Begun in 1981, Kiefer’s artistic dialogue with the poet
continued in a series of paintings and sculptures from 2004 and has extended into the present,
informing the huge sky map dotted with Celan’s poems especially conceived for the Museum
Atrium.

Gallery 205 houses some extraordinary paintings from the series For Chlebnikov (2004), inspired
by the writings of visionary Russian Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1855–1922), who used a
mathematical system to invent The Fundamental Laws of Time, a theory according to which
history is a manner of reinterpreting the past and predicting the future. The theory states that
sea war catastrophes occur precisely every 317 years. In these paintings Kiefer shows World War
II vessels suspended in mid-air and accompanied by texts referring to warships, famous battles,
and military leaders, representing Khlebnikov’s cyclical historical model.

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Science and fate are the main theme of another series inspired by the observatory that Indian
Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II (1688–1743), a noted mathematician and astronomer, had built to
watch the sky in Jaipur, a city in northern India that Kiefer had visited. In some of these artworks,
in gallery 203, such as Eridanus or Auriga, the constellations are shown dotted with measuring
instruments such as sun clocks occasionally built on architectural structures. Through the fusion
of art and science, Kiefer aims to lead mankind’s gaze to the past as a means for constructing
historical memory, while at the same time suggesting man’s vulnerability in the face of the
immensity of the cosmos.

“Their stars,” says Kiefer, “are like pieces of memory that find their way into a painting.”

Kiefer’s meditations on nature and science continue in The Secret Life of Plants (2001–02), a
group of paintings inspired by the book of the same title Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird
published in 1973 where he uses with roots, stems, and plant leaves. The book analyzes the
sensitivity of plants, their relation to cosmic order, and their capacity to respond to the mysteries
and secrets of the world for which science has no answer.

Elsewhere, particular attention is given to Kiefer’s exploration into the fragments of history. This
takes the form of a dialogue between archaic architecture, colossal cement shattered staircases,
and the pictorial representation of ancient ruins in a work from the Museum Collection included
in the exhibition, Only with Wind, Time and Sound (1997).

The title is taken from a poem by Austrian poetess and philosopher Ingeborg Bachmann, a
passionate champion of women’s rights and, like Paul Celan and Kiefer himself, skeptical about
the possibility of literature—and art in general—existing in the world after the Holocaust.

Kiefer has used Bachmann’s work to explore women’s identity and experience in two different
historical periods. These explorations are to be found in two series of works present in the show
organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

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The Women of the Revolution (1992) was completed shortly before Anselm Kiefer moved to
France. Produced in 1992 and inspired by a book by Jules Michelet (1798–1874) of the same title,
it includes a number of beds made of lead, a material Kiefer has constantly used in his sculptures,
paintings, and books since the mid-1980s, basically because it enables him to transform the world
through art as if he were “an ancient alchemist.” On the wall above each bed are photographs
and handwritten texts referring to women who played a significant role in the French Revolution,
such as Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland or Cecile Renault.

Some years later, Kiefer revisited the theme of the historical role of women in The Women of
the Antiquity (2000–04), using headless mannequins in white resin dresses to represent women
exemplary in their heroism or cruelty (such as the Greek goddess Kirke or the Roman heroine
Claudia Quinta), females whose common features were a strong character and indomitable will.
Kiefer also represents historical characters such as Berenice, an Egyptian princess from the 3rd
century BC, whose hair, according to legend, was transformed into a constellation.

Kiefer has lived in a small French town called Barjac, near Avignon, since 1993. There he has
created a laboratory for testing ideas and materials and transforming them into genuine artistic
experiences. Acclaimed as one of the most important artists working today, over the last four
decades numerous painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation exhibitions have been devoted to
his works in leading institutions and museums the world over, and his works can be found in the
most prestigious public and private art collections.

Didactic Space

To accompany the exhibition, and to give visitors the keys and tools they need for a greater
understanding of the works in Anselm Kiefer, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has designed a
didactic space that recreates the artist’s home and studio in the small French town of Barjac with
its subterranean galleries, different levels, piles of materials, works in progress, and so on. This
stage setting will give visitors further insight into the key aspects and themes found in the artist’s

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work, including alchemy, the use of unusual materials, books, plants, etc., conveying the idea of a
gesamkunstwerk or place of experimentation of the total art that Anselm Kiefer aspires to create.

Rounding off Didaktika is a range of audiovisual material, including an interview with Anselm
Kiefer recorded at the Tate Modern in London, in which the artist talks in depth about his artistic
aims and his work philosophy, as well as an interactive program that explores his biography and
his creative process.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication that includes all the main statements and
interviews by Anselm Kiefer, as well as reproductions of three hundred and fifty works that
embrace the artist’s visual adventure from 1969 till today.

For more information:

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Communications and Marketing Department
Tel: +34 944359008
Fax: +34 944359059
media@guggenheim-bilbao.es
www.gubilbao.com