Film Night: Anselm Kiefer — After the Catastrophe

Anselm Kiefer is a singular figure in contemporary art. His large, demanding works face Germany’s twentieth-century catastrophe directly and refuse to soften it through beauty, explanation, or moral reassurance. Using materials like lead, ash, straw, concrete, and burned books, Kiefer works with history and myth as things that still press on the present. These are not stories that can be finished.

He has often been described—sometimes with admiration, sometimes with unease—as brilliant, controversial, or even “bonkers.” What has never changed is his conviction that painting can still carry real weight. Born in 1945, surrounded by the ruins left by the collapse of the so-called Thousand-Year Reich, Kiefer grew up inside a landscape shaped by forces that had already done their worst. His early work engages what Carl Gustav Jung called the Wotan archetype. In Kiefer’s hands, it appears as something that overtakes a culture and then lingers—felt in what follows,…