Anselm Kiefer Quotes

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it’s art or not.

I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn’t what I was after at all.

Art maybe the only space where an indvidual can be utterly free to question himself, as well as his relationship to his God

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It’s not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can’t come out in any other way, then the other things – the skill and technique – will follow.

I am interested in reconstructing symbols. It’s about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.

Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.

When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.

I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.

But we should also not forget the difference between what first motivated me and the work that is the result.

When knowledge becomes rigid, it stops living.

The reason for this project comes from my childhood, that is clear to me. I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses.

Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.

Art is difficult. It’s not entertainment.

Because of my Calvinistic upbringing, I was trained to think that what you do has to have a purpose.

I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.

History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.

I grew up in a forest. It’s like a room. It’s protected. Like a cathedral… it is a place between heaven and earth.

As a child I had no toys; our house was bombed, but there were lots of bricks. Ruins are wonderful because they are the beginning of something new, you can do something with them.

Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.

If I do something that depresses, it’s not because I’m depressed, but because political life and history is depressing.