Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

This Autumn the Royal Academy will present the first major retrospective of Anselm Kiefer’s work to be held in the UK. The exhibition will span the Honourary Royal Academician’s 40 year career, and will include new works created specifically for the Royal Academy’s exhibition spaces.

The exhibition will be a chronological presentation encompassing painting, sculpture, photography and installation, drawn from both public and private collections.

Highlights include photographs and paintings from the controversial ‘Occupations’ and ‘Heroic Symbols (Heroische Sinnbilder)’ series of the late 1960s and early 1970s. These works record Kiefer’s re-enactment of the Nazi salute in locations across Europe, made in the belief that one must confront rather than supress the experiences of history. A series of paintings from Kiefer’s ‘Attic’ series will also be exhibited, including Father, Son and the Holy Ghost (Vater, Sohn, Heiliger Geist), (1973) depicting wooden interior spaces based on the studio space that Kiefer was occupying in Walldürn-Hornbach in South-West Germany, ‘a place to teach myself history’. Further highlights include a series of early watercolours, including From Oscar Wilde (Von Oskar Wilde) (1974) and Winter Landscape (Winterlandschaft) (1970).

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with contributions from Richard Davey, Simon Schama, Kathleen Soriano and Christian Weikop.