Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer is a German artist born in 1945 only a few months before the end of the war. He was the son of an art teacher who went off to study law and romance languages, but then returned to study painting with well known artists of the time.

The signifigance of the time and place of his birth is never lost in his work. He frequently uses symboism from the Nazi Party, from the lives of famous Nazis, and the work of German poets who deal with the same things. I relate to him because of a few different reasons. A willingness to look at parts of the past (in his case a national past, in my case a personal history) which most would prefer to turn away from. Also the use of other materials than what is normally found hanging on the walls of a gallery.

However as he continued mounting huge exhibitions one after the other and moving from studio to studio (