Anselm Kiefer

Drawing largely on his native Germany’s post-war identity, mythology and history, Anselm Kiefer worked as a sculptor, painter and installation artist – having grown up around the fallout of the second world war, amidst bombed buildings and shattered family ideals, Kiefer has commented that ‘ruins, for me, are the beginning...with the debris, you can construct new ideas’. Margarete is perhaps one of Kiefer’s most recognisable paintings – comprised of oil and straw on canvas, the painting is inspired by a fictional character created by Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan – Margarete was an Aryan woman with blonde hair, and the straw used in the piece is a representation of this. Unflinching and raw, Kiefer’s work seeks to process and analyse past events; such an approach has led to him being linked with the Neo-Expressionist movement – further emphasised by his use of such materials as ash, clay, lead and shellac.