Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany. In 1992 he moved to France, where he lives and works between Paris and Barjac, near Avignon. The artist studied Law, Literature and Linguistics before enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, and later at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he was a student of Joseph Beuys.

In 1980 he was selected to represent the West German Pavilion at the 39th Venice Biennale, and since then his work has been shown in major international solo exhibitions at some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago (1987); the Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1991); the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998); the Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001); the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2007); the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2014); the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2015); the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (2015); the Albertina in Vienna (2016); the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (2017); the Rodin Museum in Paris (2017); and the Met Breuer in New York (2018), among many others.

Kiefer received the Praemium Imperiale awarded by Japan in 1999, and in 2008 he was honoured with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 2007 he became the first artist since Georges Braque to receive a commission for a permanent installation at the Louvre Museum in Paris, and in 2018 his site-specific sculpture Uraeus was exhibited in front of New York’s Rockefeller Center. In 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned Anselm Kiefer to create a permanent installation for the Panthéon in Paris.