The mythical art of Anselm Kiefer

He's a winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and one of the world's most successful artists. Born in Donaueschingen in 1945, the final year of the war, Anselm Kiefer has lived in France since 1993. With installations, drawings and paintings, his work revolves around German mythology and explores the impact of World War II on Germans.

Raised in a strict Catholic home, Anselm Kiefer is inspired by history, religion and mythology. His color palette is one of his trademarks. In "Resumptio" (1974), a light-blue winged figure hovers over a grave. The underlying message: painting provides the power to deal with the past.

Many of Kiefer's art works refer to literature. "Margarete" (1981) plays on Paul Celan's poem "Death Fugue," a coming-to-terms of his time in a concentration camp. The poem mentions two women, Margarete and Shulamite, an Aryan and a Jew. Margarete's golden hair is not painted, but rather depicted through straw pasted onto the painting, with her name written in the background.

Anselm Kiefer used not only paint for his painting "Lilith" (1987-1990), but also coal, ash, hair, strips of lead and poppy. Lilith was the "first Eva," created by God using the same earth as Adam. The creature is both rebellious and melancholic. To express this, Kiefer uses lead, a material that often turns up in his work.

This work, named "For Paul Celan," resembles a devastated landscape. It combines shellac varnish, ashes and burned books, among other materials. Like Celan, considered the most important poet to have dealt with Auschwitz, Kiefer has sought to explore history without getting crushed under it - developing his own pictorial language, which is both constructive and destructive.

"Waterloo" belongs to a series of paintings dealing with Napoleon's defeat in Belgium. The brown earth appears warm, yet fragile. Working suggestively, Anselm Kiefer offers hints that point in many directions. Those aware of his artistic approach realize that the painting references German history and the concept of "native soil" propagated in the Third Reich.

Art once served alchemists. Now alchemy is often used by artists. This lead installation is named "Ouroboros," the alchemist's symbol of the snake biting its own tail - although the figure is nowhere to be found in it. Kiefer encrypts messages in his works, and viewers are left to figure out what they mean.

For his Centre Pompidou retrospective, Anselm Kiefer set up 40 display cases in which he installed archaic objects: plants, stones, iron or steel - materials symbolizing both the beginning and the end of life.

Living in southern France - in Barjac in the Gard region - since 1993, Kiefer has built a huge studio there. Many of his installations are so large they can barely fit into a museum. For his retrospective in Paris, he chose smaller works: paintings, photos and installations spanning his entire oeuvre.

This is the most extensive exhibition in France of German artist Anselm Kiefer (pictured) in the past three decades. Nearly 150 works of art, including 60 major paintings, are on display, along with installations, display cases and works on paper.