Polke, Kiefer & Baselitz Group exhibition featuring Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark

"The most intact world is the world of art."
– Georg Baselitz 

War, crisis and taboos can generate breakthroughs and artistic development. Following World War II, three masters of German art grappled with history and took a new, ground-breaking look at Germany. The exhibition at Kunsten will present a number of major works in Louisiana’s collection by three notable artists – Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) and Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) – three of the most influential voices in German post-war art.

Georg Baselitz has had a profound influence on international art since 1960 and is indisputably one of the most important artists of our time. He shaped a new identity for German art in the second half of the 20th century; in reaction to the trauma and tragedy of the Second World War, he developed an artistic vocabulary which draws on the work of his forebears, whilst remaining unique and wholly individual. Since then, Baselitz has consistently renewed his practice through formal developments, often responding to art history and his own extensive oeuvre to develop his central themes through an ever-evolving, yet distinct, mode of artistic expression.

Anselm Kiefer's ongoing preoccupation with cultural memory, identity and history lends his works their multi-layered subject matter, fuelled by a variety of historical, mythological and literary sources. These include references to Greek and Germanic mythology, alchemy, and Christian symbolism, as well as the writings of celebrated medieval lyricist Walther von der Vogelweide, Romanian-born poet Paul Celan, French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, and Austrian post-war poet Ingeborg Bachmann, among others.