Anselm Kiefer signs the poster for the 65th edition of the Festival dei Due Mondi

Born in Germany in the days of the fall of the Third Reich, Kiefer burst onto the German art scene in 1969 with a particularly controversial series of works dedicated to the Second World War, capable of awakening from the collective amnesia that was raging in Germany at the time.

In the course of its opera He has tackled the great themes of history, myth and memory, tackling even the most painful aspects and each time expressing his rejection of the limit, not only in its monumentality and in the power of its materiality, but also in the infinite wealth of resources with which it probes the depths of memory and the past.

Grafting his practice onto the national strand of German Expressionism and the tradition of the romantic sensibility of the nineteenth-century Nordics, Kiefer, in his works, frequently alludes to the search for a poetic truth, aware of the transcendent value of art.

Mixing the colour with ash, lacquer and other materials – up to to touching the visual impact of a high relief – the artist refers to the practice of alchemy as a process of possible understanding of reality. All opera It evokes its own history while exhibiting both the decay of the materials used and a process of regeneration represented by the use of natural elements such as seeds, flowers, or dried grass.

"Only in art do I have faith," Kiefer comments, "without it I am lost. Everything else is nothing but pure illusion."