Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Ocean Solo exhibition at Saint Louis Art Museum . (This link opens in a new tab).
The Saint Louis Art Museum will present a landmark exhibition of the work of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most influential and provocative artists of our time. “Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Ocean” will be the first comprehensive survey of Kiefer’s work in the United States in more than 20 years and will present works from the 1960s to the present. The show will occupy approximately 30,000 square feet of gallery space—making it SLAM’s largest single exhibition in decades—and will be presented with free admission for all visitors. “Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Ocean” is scheduled to open in late October or early November 2025, and run through January 2026.
Curated by Min Jung Kim, with assistance from Melissa Venator, SLAM’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Modern Art, the exhibition will showcase a compelling blend of Kiefer’s iconic works and new pieces created over the last three decades. In addition to “Brennstäbe” (Fuel Rods, 1984-87), an important work from SLAM’s collection, it will draw from significant loans from American museums and private collections. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with contributions by Kiefer scholars, as well as previously unpublished archival material.
The exhibition will also include several new works from Kiefer’s studio, including recent paintings of the Mississippi and Rhine rivers, drawing evocative parallels between the symbolic resonance of the two waterways and linking Kiefer’s thematic explorations of time, geography and the eternal flow of human history across the spectrum of the exhibition. A large-scale painting depicting the Mississippi refers to the artist’s 1991 visit to St. Louis, when he traveled by boat to see a newly constructed lock-and-dam complex just north of the city. It will be installed in the Sculpture Hall of SLAM’s original Cass Gilbert-designed building from 1904—created as part of the World’s Fair, which itself was a celebration of the importance of the Mississippi River in the ongoing industrial development of the United States.
