An Anselm, but already a Kiefer? Christoph Amend reviews Mein Rhein

The exhibition Mein Rhein by Anselm Kiefer can be seen this summer at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Salzburg. The painter is now 79 years old, and his new paintings take him back to his childhood, to his youth. Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen in 1945 and grew up in the Black Forest, in Ottersdorf in central Baden, where 2,500 residents live today, half an hour's walk from the Rhine. Kiefer often spent time on its banks in his childhood and youth. ‘The Rhine is part of my being,’ the artist writes. ‘Walking through an avenue of tall trees, you could see the shimmering silver ribbon of the river from afar, which was simultaneously the destination, the end of the journey and the promise of another, mysterious land on the other bank of the river.’ 

He appears in one of the paintings himself, a rare self-portrait. Above all, however, he portrays the Rhine and the forest paths that led him to the great river as a young boy. There is a lot of gold glittering on these Kiefers. And in one room, on the ground floor of the gallery just to the right of the entrance, completely surprising: drawings that Anselm Kiefer painted as a child, one at the age of eight, another at eleven, featuring colourful ships on the Rhine, this river on the east side of which he grew up before moving to France decades later, to the west side, where he still lives and works today.