Editor’s Note

From the 1970s to the present, Anselm Kiefer’s landscapes have remained at the core of his practice. These are not pastoral views or neutral horizons, but terrains scarred by history, heavy with memory, and open to myth. Built with thick layers of paint, straw, and earth-like matter, his surfaces resist distance and instead pull the viewer into their material weight.

The early painting Dein aschenes Haar, Sulamith (Your ashen hair, Shulamith, 1981) invokes Paul Celan’s poetry, where personal loss and historical trauma converge in haunting images of ash and silence. Kiefer translates this poetic resonance into scorched fields, charred textures, and traces of flame. The work suggests both destruction and the persistence of remembrance, transforming the landscape into a site of mourning.

Ignis Sacer (Sacred Fire) continues this meditation by focusing on elemental transformation. Fire, both purifying and devastating, becomes a force inscribed into reeds and water, suggesting cycles of death and renewal. Kiefer’s use of organic and industrial materials intensifies this sense of metamorphosis: what seems fragile is also enduring, and what burns away returns in another form.

Together, these works remind us that landscapes are never simply natural. They are palimpsests of history, myth, and survival. In their charred beauty, Kiefer’s fields insist that memory is inseparable from the earth and that even ruin carries the seeds of renewal.