BILBAO, SPAIN.- 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, on view through September 3, 2007. 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.

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.

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 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.