Top 28 Anselm Kiefer Quotes
#1. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.
Anselm Kiefer
#2. Not content, but the road the artist takes, is the interesting part.
Anselm Kiefer
#3. History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.
Anselm Kiefer
#4. I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.
Anselm Kiefer
#5. What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos.
Anselm Kiefer
#6. Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.
Anselm Kiefer
#7. 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.
Anselm Kiefer
#8. 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,
Anselm Kiefer
#9. I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.
Anselm Kiefer
#10. Because of my Calvinistic upbringing, I was trained to think that what you do has to have a purpose.
Anselm Kiefer
#11. I am against the idea of the end, that everything culminates in paradise or judgment.
Anselm Kiefer
#12. I believe in empty spaces; they're the most wonderful thing.
Anselm Kiefer
#13. When knowledge becomes rigid, it stops living.
Anselm Kiefer
#14. The book, the idea of a book or the image of a book, is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge.. I make my own books to find my way through the old stories.
Anselm Kiefer
#16. 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.
Anselm Kiefer
#17. History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.
Anselm Kiefer
#18. But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.
Anselm Kiefer
#19. 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.
Anselm Kiefer
#20. Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.
Anselm Kiefer
#21. 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.
Anselm Kiefer
#22. Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.
Anselm Kiefer
#23. Art maybe the only space where an indvidual can be utterly free to question himself, as well as his relationship to his God
Anselm Kiefer
#24. If I do something that depresses, it's not because I'm depressed, but because political life and history is depressing.
Anselm Kiefer
#25. 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.
Anselm Kiefer
#26. I never see a forest that does not bear a mark or a sign of history.
Anselm Kiefer
#28. But we should also not forget the difference between what first motivated me and the work that is the result.
Anselm Kiefer
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