Anselm Kiefer: Early Works at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
- aphillipsarts
- May 26, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 14
The work of Anselm Kiefer has been an inspiration to my own since I first began to create visual art. This superb exhibition of varied pieces from earlier in his career brought me in touch with the work in a new way, and also evoked memories of a formative encounter with his artwork twenty years previously.
About the exhibition
Anselm Kiefer: Early Works at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is a landmark exhibition of one of the world's most important living artists. Featuring paintings, watercolours, artist books, photos and woodcuts, all rarely displayed in the UK, this major exhibition takes us back to the origins of Anselm Kiefer. With 45 works made during the period 1969–82, the show explores the artist’s roots, covering an array of cultural, literary and philosophical subjects including recent German history.
Best known for his monumental paintings and installations, Kiefer has become a towering figure of post-war art. Kiefer's artistic techniques and materials – which include straw, lead, concrete, fire, and ash – are as expansive as the themes of his artworks, with pieces endlessly changing in their organic nature.
From ashmolean.org
Encountering the work
Twenty years ago this summer I was travelling in Europe with two friends on the freedom of an Interrail pass. Whilst in Denmark we visited Louisiana, a museum of modern and contemporary art situated on the east coast with stunning views looking across the sea towards Sweden. Their website notes that Louisiana is well regarded as one of the most beautiful museum's in the world, and I would gladly add my own voice to those claims.
At this point I was due to begin a Fine Art bachelors degree later that year, and my work until this time had included music and sound, video, animation, and performative elements. Many of my core themes today were present in the work then, with others yet to find expression through art but very much part of my internal world. Whilst walking around the Louisiana collection I remember turning a corner and being confronted by something, the likes of which I had not experienced before.
It was truly an encounter. On the wall facing me was a large, densely dark, vigorously textured work by Kiefer. I was not so much seeing the work or looking at it, as having a physical response to it. To be 'struck' by an artwork, or to find it 'arresting' might come closer to the experience, an affect which could be categorised as sublime in its intensity. This has to do with a correspondence between sensation and emotion, the artwork reaching out beyond the confines of its physical form.
My memory of precisely what the piece looked like is very hazy, but the above image is at least suggestive of the molten forms and foreboding potency that I recall. But that was the power of it, the embodied experience was the meaning of the work, not an intellectual comprehension of it. For me, Keifer's work at its most visceral is not about a subject or theme, but a raw expression of it.
As an artist Keifer is truly impressive for a number of reasons, one of which is his versatility whilst maintaining consistent quality through many mediums and ways of making. Draughtsman, painter in watercolour, oil painter, photographer, sculpter, book maker, performer, installation artist. Because this exhibition is focussed on his earlier work, I should also mention his later transformation of a vast swathe of former industrial land at Barjac in France, truly worthy of the german term gesamkunstwerk, or 'total work of art'.
I highly recommend the film Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, which offers a fascinating insight into Keifer at work.
Material, history and image
Depth of engagement in his own process and themes explored within the work is truly vast, but rather than bewildering the viewer this serves to offer a number of different ways to approach the work, each offering routes toward comprehending the totality of the artist's oeuvre. From the most intimate of personal details, to the vastness of creation, and beyond material existence to the unmanifest. Perhaps we could plot the layers something like this; personal, familial, national, political, historic, mythic, earth and deep time, celestial, primordial and unmanifest.
Keifer's interest in Kabbalah (a system of Jewish mysticism) and the sense of embodiment in his work speaks of the relationship between spirit and matter, that one cannot be separated from the other, and in the same way the intensely personal has all of the other layers within it. A process of divine emanation.
Alchemy and image
In the accompanying catalogue for the Ashmolean exhibition, Sabine Schütz quotes Keifer's referencing of French poet Victor Hugo in relation to Landschaft Mit Kopf; 'The unnameable reminds the nameable of its emanation from the unnameable'. Schütz continues, "In his exploration of the Shoah and Jewish mysticism which Kiefer has pursued since the 1980s, the idea of 'emanation' represents an attempt to re-institute a supreme order in the world - 'the concept that the spiritual realm is a spiral going up and down'."
Keifer has often described the transmutation of materials in the alchemical opus as relating to his own artistic processes, involving substances like lead, the use of heat and fire, seeds, and corrosion. One of the key resonances for me is how Keifer sees earth as embodiment, repository and holder of history, memory, a giver of life whilst being a place of decomposition and breaking down previously living form. This is reminiscent of an important truth; rather than life feeding on life, life feeds upon death. It is only in death that something can be transformed into that which continues life.
Anselm Keifer Early Works at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, continues until 15th June 2025.
Andrew Phillips is a Visual Artist, Psychotherapist, and Creative Mentor.
The work of Kiefer and the themes explored in his work have also influenced my own. You can find out more about my painting and drawing, and original works are available to purchase in the shop.
On the website you will also find details of the Creative Mentoring work I offer for artists, and Art Psychotherapy sessions online in the UK.
If you would like to see more of my own studio practice, as well as reflections of spirituality and creativity, my regular newsletter Numinous Landscape may be of interest. To subscribe simply submit the form at the foot of any page on the website.
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