Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Germany, in the bombed-out wreckage of World War II. Il accomplit l’une des possibilités de l’art (pas la seule) qui est de re-vivre, de re-faire l’expérience de l’histoire, de pénétrer au centre d’un événement qui …

"It begins in the dark after an intense experience, a shock", he says. When the container is opened it is, he says, like seeing the work for the first time – a rebirth.The majority of visitors to the RA will of course actually be seeing Kiefer's work for the first time.

Click to enlargeKiefer’s towers punctuate the parched landscape around his studio complex at Barjac in southern France, 2012. The only thing that survived was the couple's Singer sewing machine, which was blown into the street where it landed upside down amid the debris and dust. Unlike his peers, Kiefer has no personal memories of the war but only of its aftermath. Acrylique, émulsion et shellac sur toile, 356 x 463 cm. "It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand … A part of it should always include having to scratch your head.

Kunsthaus Zurich will present an interesting survey on artistic production made before and after WW II, consisting of works from their collection. There are tunnels and subterranean hospital wards, a lead-lined room full of water and a series of pavilions, each bigger than a squash court, with doors that open like an altarpiece triptych to reveal a single work inside. However, few viewers standing in front of the work itself could fail to sense that this is not the meretricious gobbledygook of the contemporary art world taken to a new level but that, for the artist, there is something meaningful going on, however knotted or nebulous that meaning might be.The Kiefer worldview is best seen at La Ribaute, his 200 acre compound near Barjac in the Cévennes. It must be vague, otherwise it would just be a visualisation of the shock experience." 30 mars 2016 - Anselm Kiefer | L’alchimie du livre. The upcoming exhibition at Heather James Fine Art in San Francisco will bring together works of Japanese and Japanese-American post-war pioneers. La Ribaute is the site for what Kiefer calls "reverse architecture" – putting artefacts back into the landscape. Kiefer's mother was living in the Black Forest town of Donaueschingen, where the rivers Breg and Brigach converge to form the Danube. Stapley-Brown, V. Anselm Kiefer’s studio robbed of 12 tons of raw marble and €1.3m lead sculpture, The Art Newspaper [August 31,2016] Featured images: Anselm Kiefer, via yonagelu.dvrlists.com; Anselm Kiefer in his atelier, via www.tate.org.uk; Anselm Kiefer in his atelier, via laurastevensdrawingroom.tumblr.com Some brave people will try to unravel what they see, others – sensibly perhaps – will acknowledge the presence of all those references and then immerse themselves in these allusive, baffling, mysterious and – above all – powerful pictures and sculptures.Steampunk shipping containers, planes full of sunflowers and triptychs the size of squash courts – Michael Prodger visits the place that's produced some of the most extraordinary artworks of the last centuryKiefer’s towers punctuate the parched landscape around his studio complex at Barjac in southern France, 2012. Now 69, Kiefer is the subject of a retrospective at the Royal Academy, where he is an honorary academician and which, through its summer exhibitions, has done much to bring him to the attention of the British public. The word that comes up most often when his work is discussed is the heart-sinking and slippery "references". (280 x 280cm.) Kiefer gives the old artistic adage of "truth to materials" a new twist.A favourite substance, lead, has an even weightier role: as he explains it, "lead comes from the depths of the earth, from which it is extracted and a shaman then places a chunk of it on a plinth between heaven and earth, between the spheres of the Nigredo and the spirituality of the Albedo … equally I could mention the sacred groves of the Druids, the Celts, the Germanic tribes …" No viewer confronted by Kiefer's lead books, for example, could be expected to extrapolate even a fraction of this – perhaps the only word that makes some sort of sense is "shaman".

How is one to unpick such a complex personal cosmology? La Ribaute is no longer his main workplace, he has another Ozymandian studio set-up – 36,000 square metres in a former Samaritaine department store warehouse at Croissy-Beaubourg outside Paris. There is the same encrusted paint and the same swirl suggesting both order and chaos.In this flux sits his interest in alchemy and the writings of the Jacobean astrologer-alchemist Robert Fludd. On the day he was born, 8 March 1945, the house next door, belonging to his parents' landlords, received a direct hit. Wonder no more but check out our list of his priciest works! Plongée fascinante dans le creuset de la création Art is often an inspiration for Max Mara Atelier’s luxurious line.

But where most saw ruins, the young Kiefer saw raw material for creation. Regeneration Series: Anselm Keifer From the Hall CollectionAnselm Kiefer’s studio robbed of 12 tons of raw marble and €1.3m lead sculpture Anselm Kiefer on the Existential Crisis Facing Humanity As the world-renowned German artist opens a new exhibition of replica World War II-era bomber planes, he …

Photograph: Charles Duprat When he has finished working on a piece he often returns it to the dark, putting it into a shipping container and leaving it, like wine in a bottle. His art is best … It was here that he formulated his idea that "creation and destruction are one and the same". This lump of metal set into crumbled greys and earths was a prototype Kiefer, fashioned by high explosives.Kiefer is a great revisitor of themes. These paintings, and the earth in In all Kiefer's idiosyncratic pastorals there is a link too to German Romantic painting and specifically that of One of the changes in Kiefer's work instigated by his move to France was a broadening of his themes.