A key figure in the post-war cultural landscape, Anselm Kiefer is widely regarded as one of the world’s most important living artists. Embracing monumental painting, sculpture, and installation, along with printmaking and watercolors, his vast oeuvre explores themes of myth, collective memory, history, and spirituality. Unflinching and acerbic, he was one of the first German artists to address the horrors of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. His extraordinary work builds a bridge between the past, present, and future, as relevant now as it was when first created.
Often monumental in scale, his output is rich with allusions to literature, philosophy, the kabbalah, and alchemy. He is best known for his somber paintings, their surfaces covered in a thick impasto, which often incorporate materials chosen for their symbolic significance such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and broken glass. Here, Kiefer blends elements of Neo-Expressionism and Symbolism to create complex, multilayered meditations on life, death, and the cosmos.
Superstrings, 2018-19
Anselm Kiefer
White Cube
This spring, two major exhibitions will highlight his enduring importance. In “Tell Me Where the Flowers Are,” Amsterdam’s Stedelijk and Van Gogh Museums join forces to present a major retrospective alongside a detailed look at the influence of Vincent van Gogh on Kiefer’s work. Meanwhile, “Anselm Kiefer: Early Works” at the Ashmolean in Oxford, England, explores the artist’s roots, bringing together 45 rarely displayed works from his early career, covering the period 1969–82. Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Fergus McCaffrey will exhibit new paintings and sculpture by the artist at Nijo Castle in Kyoto, Japan.
To coincide with these significant shows, Artsy highlights five contemporary artists who share something of Kiefer’s DNA.
Zhang Huan
B. 1965, Anyang, China. Lives and works in Shanghai and New York.
Great Leap Forward, 2007
Zhang Huan
Fondation Louis Vuitton
Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s long and celebrated career has encompassed painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and performance. The artist, who often cites Kiefer as an influence, blends the personal and political in his work to bear witness to the vexed history of his homeland, dealing with similar issues of collective memory, identity, spirituality, and transgression.
His extraordinary series of ash paintings depicting scenes from the Cultural Revolution, such as Great Leap Forward (2007), are especially relevant in this context. Made using incense ash collected from temples, their thick grey impasto, organic materiality, broad historical sweep, and profound spiritual and symbolic resonances bear obvious parallels with Kiefer’s work despite remaining utterly unique.
His monumental Sydney Buddha (2015)—the largest installation ever created in Australia—combined two five-meter-tall Buddhas facing each other. One was a headless metal statue, the other a sculpture made from 20 tons of incense ash, designed to decay and collapse over the course of its exhibition—forming perhaps his ultimate meditation on permanence, transience, and the brevity of life.
Idris Khan
B. 1978, Birmingham, England. Lives and works in London.
The World of Perception, 2010
Idris Khan
Victoria Miro
My Mother, 2019
Idris Khan
Victoria Miro
Idris Khan’s diverse oeuvre, including sculpture, painting, video, and photography, is united by an interest in the malleability of time and memory—topics that also inform much of Kiefer’s work. Like Kiefer, Khan draws inspiration from literary and historical sources, ranging from Beethoven scores to pages from the Qur’an.
Khan’s large-scale C-prints, such as The World of Perception (2010), use digital technology to overlay and combine multiple photographs of specific texts or images, retaining visible traces of what lies beneath each successive layer. The resulting print distills many images into one blurred and distorted palimpsest, collapsing time and memory into a single moment. Similar ideas are given three-dimensional form in his deeply moving work My Mother (2019), a sculpture created from all the surviving photographs taken of his mother during her lifetime.
Khan has been commissioned to create several important public sculptures, including the Wahat Al Karama war memorial in Abu Dhabi, consisting of a series of metal panels which seem to topple into one another like dominoes, for which he was awarded the American Architecture Prize in 2017.
Reginald Sylvester II
B. 1987, Jacksonville, North Carolina. Lives and works in Hudson, New York.
Bondage III, 2020
Reginald Sylvester II
MAXIMILLIAN WILLIAM
Untitled, 2022
Reginald Sylvester II
MAXIMILLIAN WILLIAM
Reginald Sylvester II creates paintings that draw on sculpture, and sculptures that draw on painting. Using diverse materials, from rubber, tarpaulin, sticks, and string to oxidized and patinated metals, his work attains a rich textural quality that echoes Kiefer’s. Influenced by mid-20th-century Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, his monumental sculptures and large-scale paintings have an imposing presence, exploring subjects such as spirituality, nuclear dystopias, authoritarianism, and the trauma of enslaved peoples.
His painting Bondage III (2020) consists of bold, gestural brushstrokes in a rich palette of browns, yellows, and reds, evoking the vibrancy of ethnically diverse communities. But the canvas is enveloped in a tangle of knotted and intertwined rope, suggesting a constant tension between freedom and oppression. Meanwhile, his work Offering IX (2020) uses a rubber canvas, stretched taut over a wooden support and splattered with layers of blood-red acrylic paint, to reference the historical atrocities committed in the rubber plantations of the Belgian Congo.
Goshka Macuga
B. 1967, Warsaw. Lives and works in London.
Make Tofu Not War, 2018
Goshka Macuga
McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines tapestry, sculpture, and robotics, Goshka Macuga creates site-specific installations that weave complex narratives around history, politics, and other pressing issues of our time. Like Kiefer, she draws on cultural references from the past, exploring archives and collections from which she fashions unique referential artworks, which are then displayed in tailor-made environments. She also frequently includes work by other artists and specially selected objects in her exhibitions.
In her show “It Broke from Within” (2010–11), for instance, Macuga examined the Walker Arts Center’s historic links to the devastation wrought by the American lumber industry. Archival photos from the Walker family’s lumber company were displayed alongside objects from the museum’s collection and her own monumental tapestry depicting a nearby forest, which had survived the destruction.
In Make Tofu Not War (2018), a digitally printed tapestry that can be viewed through 3D glasses, she depicts a mysterious group of figures in animal costumes deep in a forest. Ambiguous details such as the Tower of Babel, an astronaut and space capsule, and protest banners alluding to George Orwell and contemporary climate protests, create an unsettling blend of past, present, and possible future.
Widely acclaimed for her unique blend of installation work and museology, Macuga was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008 and elected to the Royal Academy of the Arts in 2023.
Emmanuel Massillon
B. 1998, Washington, D.C. Lives and works in Washington, D.C., and New York.
Staring Contest, 2022
Emmanuel Massillon
PM/AM
“Dog Food” ( Fire & Brimstone ), 2022
Emmanuel Massillon
cadet capela
Shaped by his experience growing up in the inner city of Washington, D.C., Emmanuel Massillon is a conceptual artist who draws on sources ranging from folk art, African history, and street vernacular to explore African American identity today. Infused with references to jazz, R&B, and rap music, his multilayered, textural works often employ found materials including dirt, food products, and bullet shells, alongside hand-carved wood inspired by his Haitian heritage.
In Staring Contest (2022), two printed images of traditional African busts are surrounded by separate borders of sunflower seeds and salt, a direct reference to his years spent living in an urban “food desert,” deprived of access to affordable, healthy food, where his school friends often became addicted to the sodium in salty snacks. Other paintings such as “Dog Food” (Fire and Brimstone) (2022) combine terrifying images of vicious dogs with thick layers of red paint mixed with actual dog food, to create nightmarish meditations on the use of police dogs on civil rights protestors during the 1960s.
Massillon is currently studying for his BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he was awarded a Silas H. Rhodes scholarship. Since 2017 he has exhibited in several solo shows, such as at cadet capela in Paris and UTA Artist Space in Atlanta.
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