Room 3 and 4

Anselm Kiefer (born Donaueschingen, Germany, 1945) is a highly cultured artist. This room contains three magnificent works containing references to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ string quartet and the Norse/Germanic mythology of Valhalla. The last of these shows a landscape onto which the artist has poured lead – forming a block weighing 500 kilograms – so that we can see the two great trends in painting throughout recent history: the figurative and the abstract. The other two pieces include a characteristic lead book which appears in many of Kiefer’s works. As Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has said: ‘It is almost as if Kiefer’s books are telling us to look beyond what words represent and signify, and notice instead their texture and the connections they form with each other. This is somewhat like looking at a wall and being struck by its overall feel rather than the individual bricks that compose it.’

Georg Baselitz (born Deutschbaselitz, Germany, 1938) is another of the great German artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He spent much of his childhood and youth in East Germany, a country ravaged by the Second World War, and shunned both abstraction and socialist realism to create a highly personal style centred on the human figure. This can be seen in the two works in this room: a large-scale painting, and a sculpture in which we can see the marks of the chainsaw with which he worked the original wood before casting it in bronze. The works of Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer now share space in these two rooms of the Hortensia Herrero Art Centre, as they once did in the German pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale.