Anselm Kiefer. Next Year in Jerusalem

This book imaginatively evokes one of Anselm Kiefer´s most significant exhibitions with magnificent reproductions of a provocative body of work representing his key themes, styles, and mediums. Employing a dazzling variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, and photography, Kiefer´s monumental installation, captured in this sumptuous oversize volume, manifests an array of cultural myths and metaphors, from the Old and New Testaments to the Kabbalah, from ancient Roman history to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Célan. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history, the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos, and the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual amid the ongoing destruction of the world. The illustrations in the book are preceded by a thoughtful text by the novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner, and the book concludes with a translation of Kiefer´s acceptance speech for the 2008 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a summation of his thought as artist and citizen.