Daniele Cohn: Anselm Kiefer, Gebunden

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From the attic of a former school or a disused brickyard in Germany, via an atelier in the rural surroundings in the south of France or the urban setting of the Marais in Paris, to his current studio on the outskirts of the French capital, we discover how Anselm Kiefer's work spaces have impacted his art.

To enter a painter's studio is a rare privilege and the stuff of dreams, as if access to this intimate place were the key to the very act of creation; we are admitted into the space and virtually participate in the artistic act by our very presence, rather than simply observing from the outside. In ANSELEM KIEFER: STUDIOS, Danièle Cohn reveals how Anselm Kiefer's studios—and his organization and spatial distribution of them—are essential to his artistic activity as a painter and sculptor. While they serve as production areas and storage spaces, artists' studios are also physical representations of the mind and memory of an artist, where living and working spaces combine. As Cohn states in the introduction, "It is both open and closed, a place of storage and transit, and it is the natural location for sheltering works in progress, as well as works of the past the artist has decided to keep, the materials, the manufacturing workshops, as if it were an entire industrial plant incorporating several factories and laboratories.

The painting of Anselm Kiefer, like his sculptures, results from collecting elements, traces, pieces, objects, plans, maps, books, and containers from outside the picture. "The world amasses in the studio; the studio becomes a receptacle. It is not in opposition to the open air, in an inside / outside polarity, at least not in the traditional sense of the antagonism. Rather we have a world-studio, and probably a studio-world."