Anselm Kiefer - Exhibitions

Exhibitions

In 1969, Kiefer had his first solo exhibition, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe. Along with Georg Baselitz, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Kiefer's work have been organized by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984); Art Institute of Chicago (1987); Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993); Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1991); Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998); Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2005); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2006); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2007). He was also featured in the 1997 Venice Biennale with a one-man show held at the Museo Correr, concentrating on paintings and books. In 2007, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presented an extensive survey of recent work. In 2012, the Art Gallery of Hamilton will present a show on some of the artist's paintings.

Also in 2007, Kiefer was commissioned to create a huge site-specific installation of sculptures and paintings for the inaugural "Monumenta" at the Grand Palais, Paris. With the unveiling of a triptych – the mural Athanor and the two sculptures Danae and Hortus Conclusus – at the Louvre in 2007, Kiefer became the first living artist to create a permanent site-specific installation in the museum since Georges Braque in 1953. In 2008, he installed Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday) (2006), a monumental palm tree and thirty-six steel-and-glass reliquary tablets in the auditorium-gym of the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles, an enormous Spanish Gothic edifice built in 1927. The room was reconfigured to accommodate the work. Floors were sanded to remove the basketball court's markings, and the wall for the reliquary paintings was constructed inside the space. In 2010 the piece was installed at the Art Gallery of Ontario museum in Toronto, where Kiefer created 8 new panels specifically for the AGO's exhibition of this work.

In Next Year in Jerusalem at Gagosian Gallery in 2010, Kiefer's first New York solo exhibition since 2002, each of the works, the artist explained, was a reaction to a personal "shock" initiated by something he had read, seen, or heard about.