Anselm Kiefer: Next Year in Jerusalem

by Marina Warner, Anselm Kiefer

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.

218 pages, Hardcover

First published September 26, 2011

About the author

Marina Sarah Warner is a British novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth.

She is a professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre at the University of Essex, and gave the Reith Lectures on the BBC in 1994 on the theme of 'Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time.'