Anselm Kiefer

Born in March 1945 as the war ended, Kiefer spent a formative year at 18 tracing Van Gogh's footsteps across the Low Countries and France, diary in hand. He studied under Peter Dreher and Horst Antes in the late '60s, then began building work that wouldn't look away: paintings and sculptures thick with straw, clay, shellac, materials that carry weight and decay. Paul Celan's poetry - especially "Death Fugue" - and the mystical structures of Kabbalah gave him a language for what couldn't be spoken directly. He encoded names, places, and historical figures into the surfaces, a method that aligned him with Neo-Expressionism and New Symbolism but belonged fully to no camp. In 1992 he left Germany for France, and since 2008 has worked primarily in Paris; Austria granted him citizenship a decade later.