Anselm Kiefer

Employing a dazzling variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture and photography, Kiefer's monumental installation, captured in this sumptuous oversize volume, manifests an array of cultural myths and metaphors, from the Old and New Testaments to the Kabbalah, from ancient Roman history to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history, the ancestral epics of life, death and the cosmos, and the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual amid the ongoing destruction of the world. The illustrations in the book are preceded by a thoughtful text by the novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner, and the book concludes with a translation of Kiefer's acceptance speech for the 2008 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, a summation of his thought as artist and citizen.