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Anselm Kiefer: an act of remembrance The artist reflects on the weight of history and the poetry of Paul Celan for his show in Paris
6 January 2022
“It’s not so much in my head but my heart where I receive Paul Celan’s poetry,” he says. “Sometimes it’s really difficult to understand, especially the later poems, but I always understand something even when there are no more metaphors that can be interpreted.”
In the exhibition there is a painting of a desolate, snow-ridden landscape that Kiefer started in 2018 and completed last year during the pandemic lockdown. The upper part of the painting, which is titled “Because You Found the Woe-Shard,” is dominated by lines of Celan’s poetry scratched out in spidery script. “I want the vertical part of my paintings to be marked like a school blackboard,” Kiefer says. “You could say that I created stages where Paul Celan can act.”
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