Quote

Because of my Calvinistic upbringing, I was trained to think that what you do has to have a purpose.

Anselm Kiefer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Anselm Kiefer
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: March 8
Artist
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Painter
Sculptor
Anselm Keifer
Trained
Purpose
Think
Thinking
Calvinistic
Upbringing

More quotes by Anselm Kiefer

Image
History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
When knowledge becomes rigid, it stops living.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
I grew up in a forest. It's like a room. It's protected. Like a cathedral... it is a place between heaven and earth.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
Not content, but the road the artist takes, is the interesting part.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
I am interested in reconstructing symbols. It's about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
If I do something that depresses, it's not because I'm depressed, but because political life and history is depressing.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
Art maybe the only space where an indvidual can be utterly free to question himself, as well as his relationship to his God
Anselm Kiefer
Image
Buying art is not understanding art.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
I am against the idea of the end, that everything culminates in paradise or judgment.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn't what I was after at all.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
I believe in empty spaces they're the most wonderful thing.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
As a child I had no toys our house was bombed, but there were lots of bricks. Ruins are wonderful because they are the beginning of something new, you can do something with them.
Anselm Kiefer
Image
What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos.
Anselm Kiefer