Sick Art, 1974 by Anselm Kiefer Anselm Kiefer | WahooArt.com

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"Sick Art"

Anselm Kiefer (i) - Watercolor (i) - 20 x 24 cm - 1974

Kiefer returned to his photographs of northern Norway for inspiration here, infecting this picturesque fjord with bright pink sores in heavy gouache. The title, Kranke Kunst, inscribed on the border, connotes the infamous 1937 Munich exhibition "Entartete ‘Kunst’"(Degenerate "Art"), for which the Nazis assembled more than 650 modern works from German public collections in order to demonstrate that such art was unacceptable, sick, and "un-German." Ironically, the subject here is the very land that, through medieval Icelandic literature (the Edda), is known as the chief source of knowledge about German mythology.

 




Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor, born on 8 March 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany. He studied with Peter Dreher and Horst Antes at the end of the 1960s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horrors of the Holocaust. His works are characterized by an unflinching willingness to confront his culture's dark past and unrealized potential, often on a large, confrontational scale. Kiefer has lived and worked in France since 1992.

 

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