Anselm Kiefer Early Works

Exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 14 February - 15 June 2025

Anselm Kiefer (1945-) was one of the first generation of Germans to confront the country's troubled past and national identity in the wake of the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust. Kiefer has written: ‘If we don't remember what we did, we'll do it again’. His work in the Occupations series (1969-70), in which he makes the ‘Sieg Heil’ salute, is a protest against forgetting the crimes of the past, challenging viewers to ask whether such atrocities could happen again.

This exhibition catalogue focuses on the paintings, drawings, photographs, woodcuts and artist's books produced by Kieffer between 1969 and 1982. It opens with the Occupations series and presents themes, subjects and styles that have become the signature of the artist's work, while providing a more intimate and complementary context. Filled with complex references to German socio-political history, as well as to culture, literature and his personal life, Kiefer's early works bear a unique iconography, combining classical ideas of high art with a particular understanding of concrete artistic materiality.