Anselm Kiefer Painting Expression Language Research

Anselm Kiefer is a representative of German New Expressionism and an universally acknowledged artist in contemporary Germany. He is capable of diversified forms of artistic presentation. His massive painting style and enormous texture form striking contrast with the transparency and fragility of human beings. The great artist in contemporary era retrospects the entire German cultural history profoundly which is full of contradictions but quite colorful and precious and he even intends to collect all the materials including the myths in ancient times and the materials of modern history and then include them into an anthology which is as important as the Bible in Mid Ages. As a result, he uses “shellac, asphalt and paint” to replace words and completes the content. His artistic works have multiple meanings and answer the question that how to create art and how to realize self-development in a more and more pluralistic era.Kiefer's artistic works are full of referentiality and via the use of various themes and materials, he uses different artistic styles to conduct them creation directly or indirectly. Through Kiefer's paintings, it can be found that Kiefer's painting language is able to show infinite possibility. Kiefer uses various methods like portraiture and borrowing to correlate contemporary life with past history. Let the existence of his works continue. In this way form dialogues with modern art, thus making audience think where they come from and what kind of people shall they be indirectly. And the new thought brought by Kiefer to this kind of dialogue is that he tells audience that ego can be moulded through extensive forms. Most people think Kiefer's paintings are lumbersome and the implied information is sad, tortuous and lonely. But Kiefer doesn't think so. He think loneliness is just something positive. Kiefer uses ruins to express future, loneliness to demonstrate space, pathos to explain colors and symbols to build structures. Those artistic languages are Kiefer's unique personality characteristics. Kiefer once said, “the interpretation of paintings can be colorful. There is no right or wrong here. Just see if you participate or not. If you participate and firmly believe a meaning, that is a positive result. Then the thing you firmly believe is really there.”The thesis proceeds with the expressing language in Kiefer's paintings and studies the expressing language forms in Kiefer's paintings through researches on the materials, colors, modeling and space in order to find out the supporting points hidden in the deep of those paintings. The thesis mainly expounds from three aspects:Section One summarizes the special cultural background of the era that Kiefer is in and interprets the reasons why Kiefer's art concept forms; it further explains the theoretical source of Kiefer's artistic field of vision, laying the theoretical foundation for the analysis of the expressing language in Kiefer's paintings.Section Two is to analyze the features of the expressing language in Kiefer's paintings and it expounds from four aspects including the use of materials in Kiefer's paintings, the composition of his paintings, the space expression and the application of colors and chooses the representative artistic works of each aspect to analyze, striving to interpret artistic expression of Kiefer's thought and cultural pertinence in his works.Section Three is the genralization of my reflection on the expressing language in Kiefer's paintings and the reflection is mainly drawn forth in accordance with three steps: first, analyze the influence of the introduction of German New Expressionism on Chinese artists; second, demonstrate the influence of Kiefer's techniques and forms of expression on today's young artists; at last, analyze the positioning of the subject, personality construction and image-text interflow.