Exhibitions
Anselm Kiefer carries the weight of history at the Hortensia Herrero Art Center
Eleven works explore his monumental and material universe in an exhibition that connects memory, mythology, literature, music and landscape.
The Hortensia Herrero Art Center is hosting an exhibition dedicated to Anselm Kiefer, one of the great names in European contemporary art and an artist who has made memory, history and matter the main axes of his language, until October 25, 2026. The exhibition, open from April 29 to October 25, occupies six galleries in the Valencian space and brings together eleven works, four of which are part of the permanent collection.
The exhibition allows us to enter a monumental universe in which painting, sculpture and architecture merge. Kiefer works with dense surfaces, marked by layers, cracks, textures and materials that evoke the passage of time and the fragility of memory. Straw, lead, ash, earth, wood or plant elements are a regular part of his vocabulary, turning the works into physical territories that seem to have suffered the same wounds as the history they represent.
His work often starts from a dialogue between past and present. German history, classical mythology, literature, philosophy, music and landscape appear as sources of an imaginary that avoids simple readings and invites reflection on destruction, memory, identity and reconstruction.
In the rooms of the Hortensia Herrero Art Center, these concerns are unfolded through works inspired by classical myths and texts by poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Walther von der Vogelweide and Rainer Maria Rilke. Music also occupies a prominent place in her universe, with references to compositions such as Der Tod und das Mädchen ( Death and the Maiden ) by Franz Schubert.
The proposed experience is, therefore, closer to a journey through a mental landscape than to a conventional succession of paintings. The large dimensions, the density of the materials and the symbolic charge of the pieces generate an immersive atmosphere in which the visitor finds himself in front of works that speak of time not only through their content, but also through their own materiality.
Kiefer is an artist particularly interested in what remains after destruction. His works seem like ruins, archives or archaeological landscapes in permanent transformation. Lead, a recurring material in his production, thus acquires a double condition: it is weight and it is memory. The surface ceases to be a simple support to become a space where layers of history accumulate.
This way of understanding art has led Kiefer to intervene in some of the most emblematic spaces of Western culture. In 2007, he became the first artist since Georges Braque to be commissioned to create a permanent installation for the Louvre Museum in Paris. Eleven years later, in 2018, his sculpture Uraeus was presented in front of Rockefeller Center in New York, in a site-specific intervention that put the monumentality of the piece into dialogue with urban architecture.
His bond with France was strengthened in 2020, when President Emmanuel Macron commissioned him with a permanent installation for the Pantheon in Paris, one of the great monuments of French memory.
Kiefer's career is marked, in short, by this desire to confront art with what history leaves behind. His works do not simply seek to represent the past, but to make it present through matter. In Valencia, the eleven pieces gathered at the Hortensia Herrero Art Center offer the opportunity to enter this complex territory, where literature meets music, myth meets history and landscape meets memory.
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