Anselm Kiefer: Nymphäum
€ 60.00
The white light of the space strikes the thick surfaces [of the works], getting lost in the cracks in the paint, in the layers of material, in its wounds, in the streaks of oxidation and the fragments of lead encrusted like fossilised shards. With the exhibition Nymphäum, Kiefer transforms the Pantin space into a telluric sanctuary, a place where Greek mythology rises to the surface in the form of ash, mud, gold and memory.
— Thibaut Wychowanok, Numéro Art
Salmakis und Hermaphroditos, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis,
and collage of canvas on canvas
380 × 280 cm (149.61 × 110.24 in)
Across more than 20 paintings, in Nymphäum at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin, Anselm Kiefer orchestrates richly layered paint and collaged elements to reimagine narratives sourced from classical mythology.
Die Hesperiden, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment
of electrolysis, and collage of canvas on canvas
280 × 382 cm (110.24 × 150.39 in)
The title of the exhibition translates as ‘nymphaeum’, referring to sanctuaries consecrated to the nymphs in ancient Greece and Rome. Kiefer transforms the gallery into his own painterly nymphaeum: a new chapter in the interweaving of myth and matter that has defined his practice for more than five decades.
Watch the exhibition video
Klytia, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment
of electrolysis, and collage of canvas on canvas
384 × 283 cm (149.61 × 110.24 in)
Kiefer amasses and continually reworks motifs as tools to excavate the depths of human history. In this new body of work, he turns his attention to nymphs: embodiments of nature rooted in classical mythology and yet urgently contemporary.
These figures become conduits for an idea at the heart of Kiefer’s artmaking: humanity’s profound entanglement with the cycles of the natural world. Some of Kiefer’s nymphs occupy bucolic settings reminiscent of their classical origins, while others inhabit distinctly modern worlds.
Komnemos Mosaic, 12th century
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.
Gustav Klimt
The Kiss, 1907–8
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.
In a group of vertiginous cityscapes, Kiefer replaces his signature desolate landscapes with welcoming façades, their glowing windows rendered with meticulous gold leaf in grid-like arrangements, which curator Corinna Thierolf compares to both Byzantine mosaics and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–8) in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. Inspired by the light falling through the trees of New York’s Central Park, the artist identified in the most urban of settings a space for the otherworldly.
Iphigenie, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment
of electrolysis, and collage of canvas on canvas
380 × 280 cm (149.61 × 110.24 in)
In the galleries at Pantin, the paintings take on an architectural quality. We are no longer looking at paintings but at walls, cliffs and altars. The surfaces are scarred, furrowed and torn open like earth after a bombardment. The painting is no longer merely pictorial: it takes on a mineral quality.
— Thibaut Wychowanok, Numéro Art
Vine-like profusions scar the foregrounds of these paintings, rendered so texturally that they appear to pierce the canvas, sprouting through it as if reclaiming the man-made world. Across Kiefer’s work, nature battles to take back ravaged terrains in a metaphor for the inevitability of cyclical destruction and rebirth against the backdrop of the scarred landscape of post-war, post-industrial Europe.
William Bouguereau
Les Oréades, 1902
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
The sweeping lineup of mountain nymphs in the monumental Die Oreaden (2025), standing at almost eight metres in width, translates the idyllic twilight scene of William Bouguereau’s Les Oréades (1902) into bleak, shadowy mountains below a burnished sky.
Nothing is fully revealed. The sight of the crater brings to mind Kiefer’s early experience of bomb craters left by air raids on Donaueschingen that he played in as a child. Pieces of rubble became his building blocks, and a new world was built from the ruins of the old one. Kiefer’s gaze takes in the past and the future at once. The crater collects what was and is open to what may become. His nymphs do not repose in myths. They appear – beneath a sky that could as easily signify dawn or dusk.
— Corinna Thierolf
Dryope, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment
of electrolysis, and collage of canvas on canvas
193 × 285 cm (75.98 × 112.2 in)
While Kiefer’s concrete high-rises and hostile landscapes appear inhospitable to spirits of nature, his dense, impasto surfaces seem to offer them fleeting shelter.
Also on view are two painted triptych screens, described by Thierolf as ‘providing protection for the nymphs – as if the painter wanted to offer the ephemeral beings refuge for a short while, albeit fully aware that even the slightest breath of air would be enough to drive them away again.’
Actaea, 2021–2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of
electrolysis, chalk, and collage of canvas on canvas
560 × 760 cm (220.47 × 299.21 in)
Despite their unequivocal presence, it seems [Kiefer’s nymphs] prefer to withdraw from view: rather than stepping forwards into the limelight, they are hauntingly intangible, hovering on the margins of perception. Anyone contemplating Actaea may wonder if that really is a nymph, or is it just ‘something’ semi-submerged in the darkness of the water.
— Corinna Thierolf
Thetis, 2022–2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, chalk, charcoal,
and collage of canvas on canvas
280 × 470 cm (110.24 × 185.04 in)
Spirit is life
It flows thru the death of me
endlessly like a river
unafraid of becoming the sea
— Gregory Corso
Aphrodite und Ares, 2018–2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment
of electrolysis, straw, and collage of canvas on canvas
280 × 380 cm (110.24 × 149.61 in)
The language of material plays an essential role in Kiefer’s work, and across the exhibition, highly symbolic connections emerge from shellac and chalk, collaged straw and charcoal.
Nymphäum, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf and
sediment of electrolysis on canvas
191 x 281 cm (75.2 x 110.63 in)
Kiefer also employs sediment of electrolysis – the jade-coloured residue left behind when metal is exposed to an electrical current – like paint, applying it generously to his canvases to denote foliage or water.
Like the opulent gold leaf that Kiefer uses to represent the sky or light, this sediment recalls alchemical processes for the transmutation of matter into gold, a recurring influence in the artist’s work.
Alchemy is a symbol for the artist… you have to destroy and then recreate.
— Anselm Kiefer
Daphne, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of
electrolysis, and collage of canvas on canvas
190 × 280 cm (74.8 × 110.24 in)
In Nymphäum, such transformation finds expression in subject as well as in material. The artist depicts nymphs in metamorphosis, a key theme in classical literature. In Daphne (2025), the eponymous river nymph materialises from the laurel tree into which she was transformed in Ovid’s account.
Carya, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment
of electrolysis, and collage of canvas on canvas
280 × 380 cm (110.24 × 149.61 in)
In Carya (2025), the bloom-like face of the titular nymph emerges from the leaves of the walnut tree that bears her transfigured form. Almost camouflaged among the textural surfaces, they appear as if born directly from dynamic material reactions on the canvases.
Philyra, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, sediment of electrolysis,
and collage of canvas on canvas
193 x 194.5 cm (74.8 x 74.8 in)
Art cannot live on itself. It has to draw on a broader knowledge. It needs to bear the scars of the world, the wounds of life.
— Anselm Kiefer
Smilax, 2025
Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment
of electrolysis, and collage of canvas on canvas
193 × 192 cm (75.98 × 75.59 in)
Watching over the natural world, the nymphs weave a connection between figure and nature, and interior and exterior realms, softening the frontiers between landscape and portraiture. This collapse of figure and ground animates the works’ stratified ‘earth’, which becomes, as Thierolf writes, ‘a place of remembrance: overgrown, closed, but not silent’.
Publication
Published on the occasion of the monumental exhibition Anselm Kiefer, Nymphäum at Thaddaeus Ropac in Pantin, this catalogue documents the exceptional new body of work by the German artist focused on the mythological figure of the nymph.
In the press
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany. In 1992, he moved to France, where he lives and works between Paris and Barjac near Avignon. The artist studied law, Romance languages and literatures before attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. As a young artist, Kiefer visited Joseph Beuys and participated in some of his ‘actions’. He was selected for the West German Pavilion at the 39th Venice Biennale in 1980 and his works have since been shown in prominent solo exhibitions internationally, including at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984); Art Institute of Chicago (1987); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1991); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1998); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2001); Guggenheim Bilbao (2007); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Bibliothèque nationale de France (2015); Albertina, Vienna (2016); State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2017); Rodin Museum, Paris (2017); Met Breuer, New York (2018); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2019).
