Anselm Kiefer Quotes

I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.

Every painting I do blends time frames. The great thing about being an artist is I can make the past join the present in some reality of the future.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

Film is the only language I speak, and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don't want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities.

I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

It's always a nice feeling, having people think that you feel things much deeper than you're allowed to say, but this isn't true. If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.

The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history.

Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.

One can re-create what was in the mind of a mathematician a thousand years ago, recapture the truth of the intellect wherever it may have once come to light; but the image of art, that infinite variable of perception and expression in the individual, - that is not easily re-created, at least, not with certainty and in its original fulness.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

I started out as an artist, and what I do is verbal paintings. I paint a picture. Hopefully, you'll see the characters and what they're doing and what they're saying.

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

An artiste's input, her ability to create dimensions within the given space is very important.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.