Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Klaus Dermutz

Anselm Kiefer discusses his art, aesthetics, and creative processes in ten conversations with Klaus Dermutz, covering influential thinkers, controversial status, and German history themes. The book offers insight into the mind of a gifted creator and appeals to artists, critics, art historians, cultural journalists, and anyone interested in the visual arts and literature of the twentieth century.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 374 pages
Publication date: 23 September 2022
Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd

Klaus Dermutz's ten conversations with the writer and theologian Klaus Dermutz explore the essential elements of Kiefer's art, aesthetics, and creative processes. Kiefer, the only visual artist to have won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, is a profoundly literary painter who describes how the central materials of his art, such as lead, sand, water, fire, ashes, plants, clothing, oil paint, watercolor, and ink, influence the act of creation. His intellectual and artistic touchstones include the sixteenth-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria, the German Romantic poet Novalis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Marcel Proust, Adalbert Stifter, the operas of Richard Wagner, the Catholic liturgy, and the innovative theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor. Kiefer and Dermutz discuss all of these influential thinkers, as well as Kiefer's own status as a controversial figure. His relentless examination of German history, the themes of guilt, suffering, communal memory, and the seductions of destruction have earned him equal amounts of criticism and praise. The conversations in this book offer a rare insight into the mind of a gifted creator, appealing to artists, critics, art historians, cultural journalists, and anyone interested in the visual arts and the literature and history of the twentieth century.

Weight: 422g
Dimension: 128 x 205 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781803090382