(Donaueschingen 1945–lives and works in Paris)

Des Malers Atelier. 1982.

Gouache and offset on paper.

Titled in the centre of the illustration: Des Malers Atelier, also signed and dated on the reverse: Anselm Kiefer 82.

59 × 78 cm.

Provenance:
- Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
- First Bank of Minneapolis.
- Lang & O'Hara Gallery, New York (verso with the label).
- Private collection Baltimore.
- Christie's New York, Auction 28 September 2017, lot 81 (verso with the label).
- Lempertz Cologne, Auction 03 December 2021, lot 45 (verso with the label).
- Private collection Northern Germany.

Exhibition: Baltimore 1988, German Expressionist Graphics. The Baltimore Museum of Art, 9 August - 9 October 1988 (verso with the label).


“These are abandoned buildings / places / spaces that he examines, occupies, marks, where he goes in search of traces in order to leave traces himself. Spaces that allow him to create his own cosmos. Places that he reflects and interprets through memories and traces." (quoted by Susanne Kleine in: Anselm Kiefer in the Beginning. Works from the Private Collection of Hans Grothe, exh.cat., Cologne 2012, p. 68)

This striking description of Anselm Kiefer's studios and their central importance in his oeuvre illustrates the great significance and inextricable link between the place where the works are created and the essence of the final work. These are magical spaces where Anselm Kiefer's often bulky, sometimes literally leaden works are created: an abandoned brickyard in the Odenwald, a disused silk factory in the French Cévennes, empty warehouses filled with industrial waste and surrounded by lonely, overgrown nature.

Anselm Kiefer is one of the best-known German contemporary artists. In his work, which is characterised by a heavy materiality, he deals with existential questions. Politics, religion, mysticism, myth, alchemy, and cosmology form the complex of themes from which Anselm Kiefer composes his pictorial and sculptural works. In the large, sparse studio spaces, the spirit of history seems omnipresent. At the same time, the direct influence of his studios on his works runs like a leitmotif through his oeuvre: frequently changing locations, constantly growing in their sheer size, themselves bearers of history, memories, traces of previous generations. The artist is not interested in reproducing real history, but in archiving its traces, what remains. When Anselm Kiefer refers directly to the theme of "the painter's studio" in his work, he is referring to the essential value of this place. Just as there is always room in his paintings for personal development and associations, the size of the studio also facilitates the development of a world in which Kiefer sees himself as an "assistant of memory".

In the work offered here, the roofs of some buildings (indicated by Kiefer in pencil as the painter's studio) seem to stand out brightly from the dark swathes of sky and the gloomy undergrowth of the meadow, like an auspicious promise. At the same time, the hidden, the mythical remains. Like relics of a bygone era, the building fragments seem to reveal nothing, but only allow us to guess, as traces of a more comprehensive reality.