Anselm Kiefer discovers the new Rheingold Gerald Heidegger in conversation with the artist

‘The Rhine is part of my being,’ says the German painter Anselm Kiefer and is now showing 16 large-format works in Salzburg depicting a river that has not only inspired art. Kiefer's series is called ‘My Rhine’ and reads as an elementary, personal exploration of a river that also marks a warlike border. Kiefer wants to overcome all attributions to this river and yet picks up on everyone's own ideas about the Rhine.

And they are elementary works that ultimately quote the great panels of European painting and, not least, take up the motif of Caspar David Friedrich's lonely wanderer. The paint is thickly applied to these works and the only smooth surfaces are covered in gold leaf.

It is an inner landscape of the Rhine that Kiefer presents here, to which the viewers can connect, as one always has real images of the Rhine in front of one's eyes, which overlap with the ideal or the Rhine as a motif of various art genres in one's mind.