October 18, 2025–January 25, 2026
Taylor Hall
In 1991, Anselm Kiefer stood at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and saw echoes of the Rhine River. The vast scale and turbulent waters of the American heartland stirred memories of his German childhood and made a lasting impression. That moment became the starting point for Becoming the Sea, Kiefer’s first major American museum exhibition in 20 years.
Born in Germany in 1945, Kiefer is internationally acclaimed for his thought-provoking works. One of the first postwar artists to confront Germany’s Nazi past, he has since expanded his subjects to encompass global history and myth. His richly layered surfaces suggest connections across time, culture, and geography.
Becoming the Sea focuses on rivers—real places that carry deep symbolic meaning. This striking exhibition features new paintings depicting rivers and water nymphs in lush greens and golds, alongside earlier works that trace Kiefer’s engagement with water since the 1970s. It culminates in a dramatic, site-specific installation in the Museum’s historic Sculpture Hall, where towering canvases evoke water’s elemental power. Together, these paintings explore rivers as forces of nature and vessels for memory, transformation, and time.
Gary C. Werths and Richard Frimel Galleries 248 and 249
Der Rhein (The Rhine), 2024
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis on canvas
Private collection 2025.317
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer grew up in a German town on the Rhine, where it forms the border with France. As a boy, he looked across the river and imagined the country on the other side as a utopia. This scene of trees screening the blue of the river captures that idyllic fantasy.
Grenze (Border), 2024
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.312
Visitor Guide Description:
Borders are a frequent theme in Kiefer’s art and have played a major role in his life, including his childhood on the Rhine, his years in West Germany, and his 1992 move to France. However, the artist also considers borders in more abstract terms as boundaries between people and ideas. In this self-portrait, the fence is a physical barrier inviting reflection on borders real and imagined.
Dans ce vert linceul (In This Green Shroud), 2024
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.316
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer lies on his back, holding a branch with golden flowers. The branch, pose, and nightshirt first appeared in self-portraits Kiefer produced in the late 1960s. In the darkness above are lines from the 1853 poem “The Butterflies” by Gérard de Nerval: “Lose myself in the green shroud: / Watch above my upturned head / Every one of them go by. / Thoughts of love, of poetry!”
Pence, 2015–24
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, sediment of electrolysis, gold leaf, lead, and collage on canvas
Private Collection 2025.319
Orithyia, 2024
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, and charcoal on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.318
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer’s recent works shimmer with lush greens and radiant golds, the result of ongoing experimentation with new materials. The gold is real—applied as delicate sheets to evoke a glowing, ethereal sky. No paint can replicate how it glimmers in light and glows in shadow. The green coloration comes from electrolysis—a process in which copper is submerged in a salt bath and subjected to an electrical current. This causes the copper to oxidize, forming a blue-green sediment. This byproduct settles at the bottom of the bath, where Kiefer harvests it. He then suspends the sediment in various liquids to produce richly nuanced greens, using them in his paintings to represent bodies of water, alive with depth and turbulence.
Gallery 250
Nibi, Apotamkin, Ne Hwas, 2018–24
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, lead, sediment of electrolysis, and charcoal on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.320
Visitor Guide Description:
This painting is the result of Kiefer’s research into the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers for Becoming the Sea. Each panel depicts a personification of water and associated spirit beings from Indigenous North American peoples. Nibi is the Anishinaabe word for water and is also honored as a spirit and a sacred source of life. Apotamkin and Ne Hwas are spirits from Wabanaki groups. Both were women who, according to tradition, transformed into sea monsters or serpents.
Für Paul Celan (For Paul Celan), 2017–19
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, lead, clay, terracotta, steel, chalk, and charcoal on canvas
Collection of the artist 2025.331
Visitor Guide Description:
This is one of two works in the exhibition associated with the poet Paul Celan. It bears the opening lines of an unpublished poem he wrote around 1963: “Conversations with tree bark / peel yourself come peel me / from my word.” The painting’s textured surface forms a bark-like crust, its flaking layers echoing Celan’s imagery.
Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love), 2017
oil, emulsion, acrylic, and lead on canvas
Peter Marino Art Foundation 2025.335
Visitor Guide Description:
Lead curls into cresting waves against a dark, moonlit sea. The painting’s title recalls the ancient Greek story of Hero and Leander as retold in Franz Grillparzer’s 1831 play. In the story, Leander perishes while crossing stormy water to reach his beloved Hero.
Anabeth and John Weil Gallery 251
Visitor Guide Description:
Each woodcut in this gallery is unique. Kiefer made them by collaging multiple woodcuts onto a single canvas and adding paint and other materials to create a unified composition.
Sol Invictus Elagabal, 1996–2023
collage of woodcuts on paper with emulsion, acrylic, shellac, and charcoal, mounted on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.323
Visitor Guide Description:
The name of this work refers to the ancient Roman emperor Elagabalus, who came from Roman Syria and brought worship of the local sun god Sol Invictus. As ruler, Elagabalus adopted the title Sol Invictus Elagabal. Here, Kiefer lies on the ground beneath a forest of sunflowers, whose heads resemble black suns.
Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles (This Dark Brightness That Falls From the Stars), 1997–2015
woodcut, sunflower seeds, and charcoal on paper, mounted on canvas
Eschaton Kunststiftung 2025.329
Visitor Guide Description:
Sunflower seeds rain down on a parched desert like “dark brightness that falls from the stars.” Kiefer took this line from Pierre Corneille’s 1637 play Le Cid, based on the legend of El Cid. In the passage, El Cid recounts his successful nighttime battle to reconquer Al-Andalus, an area of present-day Portugal and Spain under Muslim rule from 711 to 1492.
Die Reintöchter (The Rhinemaidens), 1982–2013
collage of woodcuts on paper with acrylic and shellac, mounted on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.330
Visitor Guide Description:
The Rhinemaidens float in the waters of the Rhine. They are characters from Richard Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), which premiered in 1876. The nymphs guard the Rhinegold, which is stolen and forged into a ring. The cycle closes with the ring’s return to the Rhine, an act that restores the balance of nature.
Teutoburger Wald (Teutoburg Forest), 1993
collage of woodcuts on paper with acrylic and shellac, mounted on canvas
Collection of the artist 2025.321
Visitor Guide Description:
At the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, Germanic tribes fought back the Roman army and stopped its advance. Since the 18th century, German nationalists, including the Nazis, have cited the battle in their false claims for a unified and unconquered Germany. The portraits depict notable figures from German history.
Maginot, 1982–2013
collage of woodcuts on paper with acrylic and shellac, mounted on canvas
Eschaton Kunststiftung 2025.324
Visitor Guide Description:
A bonfire and bunker float above an idyllic scene of the Rhine screened by trees. The title refers to the Maginot Line, a series of fortifications built by France in the 1930s against invasion by Germany. The line was an expensive failure. It stopped at the Belgian border, allowing the German army to bypass it and invade from the north.
Visitor Guide Description:
Die Frauen der Antike (The Women of Antiquity)
In this ensemble of sculptures, Kiefer recognizes notable women from ancient history. Dresses cast in plaster, resin, or bronze convey both their presence and absence. The object replacing each woman’s head is symbolic of her identity.
Eulalia, 2018
resin, leather, and plaster
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.326
Visitor Guide Description:
St. Eulalia was an early Christian martyred in 304 CE in Barcelona, Spain, where she is a patron saint. She was brutally whipped, an ordeal Kiefer represents with a long leather whip.
Thusnelda, 2019
resin, plaster, wood, and annealed wires
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.327
Visitor Guide Description:
Thusnelda was a Germanic tribal queen who was captured by a Roman general and displayed as a victory trophy. Her head of bundled sticks refers to her home in Germany’s ancient forests.
Melancolia, 2025
bronze, steel, and glass
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.328
Visitor Guide Description:
Melancolia is a personification of the emotional state of melancholy. The truncated polyhedron identifies her with one of the most famous works in German art history, Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I of 1514, illustrated at left.
Sappho, 2025
bronze and lead
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.325
Visitor Guide Description:
Sappho was an ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, renowned for her lyric poetry that explores themes of love and desire between women. Since the 19th century, she has been celebrated as a queer icon. Kiefer represents her here with a stack of lead books.
Paete non dolet, 2025
bronze, thorns, and plaster
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.322
Visitor Guide Description:
This work’s Latin title translates to “Paetus, it does not hurt.” The phrase is attributed to Arria, wife of Roman senator Paetus, who was condemned to death. When he hesitated to face his fate, Arria reassured him with the words of the title. Kiefer represented her with a bundle of thorny vines—an emblem of sacrifice.
Alvin and Ruth Siteman Gallery 253
Die deutsche Heilslinie (German Lineages of Salvation), 2012–13
oil, emulsion, acrylic, and shellac on canvas
Eschaton Kunststiftung 2025.314
Visitor Guide Description:
The names of German philosophers rise over the Rhine toward an ominous cloud, while others sink in the muddy waters below. The painting’s title comes from The Principle of Hope, a book Ernst Bloch wrote in the 1950s while in exile in the United States. In it, Bloch describes lineages of “good” and “bad” German thinkers. The names in the sky are Kiefer’s “good” Germans; those in the water represent the “bad.”
Becoming the ocean, for Gregory Corso, 2024
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, sediment of electrolysis, gold leaf, stones, and annealed wire on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.315
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer built up layers of paint, shellac, and stones into a hypnotic, undulating expanse of parallel ridges, which evoke waves in an ocean or plowed furrows in a field. This is one of two paintings in the exhibition dedicated to the American Beat poet Gregory Corso.
Brennstäbe (Fuel Rods), 1984–87
oil, acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas with ceramic, iron, copper wire, straw, and lead
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer Jr., by exchange 108:1987a-c
Visitor Guide Description:
Fuel Rods was Kiefer’s first work to enter the Museum’s collection. It began as a landscape of the Odenwald mountain range, to which Kiefer added straw and molten lead to create a peeling surface reminiscent of waves. The painting’s subject is the division and fusion of bodies told through two parallel subjects: nuclear power, which involves the splitting of atoms, and the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris and Isis, in which Isis reunites the dismembered pieces of Osiris’s body.
Saturnzeit (Saturn Time), 1986
oil and acrylic emulsion, shellac, and crayon over painted photographs, ferns, and lead
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Keith L. and Katherine Sachs, 2020-65-1 2025.305
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer has worked with lead since the late 1970s, attracted by its unique physical properties and rich symbolism. Here, he combines the metal with photographs, paint, crayon, and a dried fern. Alchemists historically associated lead with the planet Saturn and with melancholy.
Gallery 254
Die Milchstraße (The Milky Way), 1985–87
oil, emulsion, acrylic, and shellac on canvas with applied copper wires and lead
Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum, In Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, General and Restricted Purchase Funds, 1988 2025.304
Visitor Guide Description:
The ancient Greeks called the band of dim light in the night sky the “milky circle” because its soft white glow resembled milk. Kiefer transports the galaxy to the middle of a winter field. A metal funnel channels the stars from above into the humble ditch.
Ich – Du (I – You), 1971
oil on canvas, mounted on canvas, in 11 parts
Hall Collection 2025.303
Kopf im Wald, Kopf in den Wolken (Head in the Forest, Head in the Clouds), 1971
oil and fabric collage on canvas, two panels
The Broad Art Foundation 2025.308
Visitor Guide Description:
These works show the enduring connection between biography and nature in Kiefer’s art. In I – You, scenes from Kiefer’s home in the Odenwald are inscribed with references to his wife, Julia, and the birth of their first child, Daniel. In Head in the Forest, Head in the Clouds, he pairs a self-portrait in the forest with a portrait of Julia asleep in the clouds above a river.
Roxanne H. Frank Galleries 255, 256, and 257
Unternehmen Seelöwe (Operation Sea Lion), 1976
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, sand, and charcoal on canvas
Collection of the artist 2025.332
Des Herbstes Runengespinst (Autumn’s Runic Weave), 2005–06
emulsion, acrylic, oil, shellac, burnt wood, burnt books, charcoal, metal, and wire on canvas
Collection of the artist 2025.313
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer was born in 1945, as bombs fell on Donaueschingen in the final days of World War II. He played in the rubble as a child, but the war remained unspoken. His early works of the 1960s and ’70s broke this silence, directly confronting Germany’s past and provoking public outrage at the time.
The two paintings in this gallery reflect the dual nature of Kiefer’s engagement with the history of World War II and the Holocaust. Operation Sea Lion satirizes the grandiosity and ultimate failure of the Nazi regime, while Autumn’s Runic Weave—titled after a poem by Paul Celan—mourns its victims.
Exhibition Materials—Books
Am Rhein (On the Rhine), 2025
Die Frauen der Antike (The Women of Antiquity), 2024
Krypta (Crypt), 2025
Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn), 2020
Die Ungeborenen (The Unborn), 2024
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer’s artist books take many forms and have been important to his practice since the beginning of his career. The five books selected for this exhibition explore a wide range of themes and are designed to be handled by visitors.
Nigredo, 1984
oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, and straw on photograph, mounted on canvas with woodcut
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in celebration of their twentieth anniversary, 1985-1 2025.306
Visitor Guide Description:
A field appears scorched, as if devastated by fire. The painting’s title, Nigredo, is the name of the first step in alchemical transformation, in which raw materials burn to ash or decompose. Conceptually, nigredo proposes that creation follows destruction, an idea central to Kiefer’s art.
Gallery 258
Die Orden der Nacht (The Orders of the Night), 1996
acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas
Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Richard and Elizabeth Hedreen 2025.307
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer lies in the Savasana yoga pose, also called the corpse pose, underneath a canopy of sunflowers. The title comes from the 1956 poem “An die Sonne” (To the Sun) by Ingeborg Bachmann. In it, she describes the sun as “more beautiful than the stars, the illustrious orders of the night.” Here, the sunflowers can be read as black suns or stars that absorb light.
Sculpture Hall
In 1991, Anselm Kiefer stood at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and saw echoes of the Rhine River. The vast scale and turbulent waters of the American heartland stirred memories of his German childhood and made a lasting impression. That moment became the starting point for Becoming the Sea, Kiefer’s first major American museum exhibition in 20 years.
Born in Germany in 1945, Kiefer is internationally acclaimed for his thought-provoking works. One of the first postwar artists to confront Germany’s Nazi past, he has since expanded his subjects to encompass global history and myth. His richly layered surfaces suggest connections across time, culture, and geography.
Becoming the Sea focuses on rivers—real places that carry deep symbolic meaning. This striking exhibition has two parts. Galleries in the East Building feature new paintings depicting rivers and water nymphs in lush greens and golds, alongside earlier works that trace Kiefer’s engagement with water since the 1970s. A dramatic, site-specific installation here in the Museum’s historic Sculpture Hall includes towering canvases that evoke water’s elemental power. Together, these paintings explore rivers as forces of nature and vessels for memory, transformation, and time.
Visitor Guide Description:
Sculpture Hall is the heart of the Museum’s historic 1904 World’s Fair building. Its magnificent space inspired Kiefer to create a site-specific installation of five monumental paintings.
Am Rhein (On the Rhine), 2025
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.334
Anselm fuit hic (Anselm Was Here), 2024
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.309
Visitor Guide Description:
Rivers have shaped Kiefer’s life. He was born in Germany near the source of the Danube and grew up on the Rhine across from France. In these two paintings, Kiefer has returned to the river he experienced in his youth: a tree-lined, blue-green ribbon flowing through the countryside beneath a golden sky.
Missouri, Mississippi, 2024
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, and collage of canvas on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.310
Lumpeguin, Cigwe, Animiki, 2025
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.311
Visitor Guide Description:
During a 1991 visit to St. Louis, Kiefer traveled up the Mississippi in a small boat to the Melvin Price Lock and Dam in Alton, Illinois. The violent waves and hulking dam in Missouri, Mississippi recall that event. Above the dam, a woman with outstretched arms and legs floats over a tributary map of the Mississippi River system. As a water nymph, she personifies the river and its many branches. In Lumpeguin, Cigwe, Animiki, three female figures representing spirit beings from Anishinaabe and Wabanaki Native peoples protect the river below.
Für Gregory Corso (For Gregory Corso), 2021–25
emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, and gold leaf on canvas
Collection of the artist and courtesy Gagosian 2025.333
Visitor Guide Description:
Kiefer took the exhibition title, Becoming the Sea, from a 1981 work by American Beat poet Gregory Corso. In the poem, Corso contemplates the idea of an eternal spirit that survives death, comparing it to a river “unafraid / of becoming / the sea.” The metaphor offers perspective on life’s greatest mystery.
Visitor Guide Artist Bio:
Anselm Kiefer
Born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, Anselm Kiefer is one of the most significant artists today. His practice comprises paintings, sculptures, installations, books, and works on paper, such as drawings, woodcuts, watercolors, and photographs. The materials he uses—from lead, concrete, and glass to textiles, ashes, and plants—are as vast as they are symbolically resonant. Kiefer’s vision encompasses philosophy, history, and literature and brings to light the importance of the sacred and the spiritual, myth and memory, metamorphosis and renewal. He has lived and worked in France since 1992.
1966 Begins artistic training in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, continues in Karlsruhe, Germany
1969 Performs Occupations, a series of actions engaging with the memory of World War II and Nazism to break the silence surrounding the country’s recent past
late 1970s Begins to use lead as a material in his work
1980 Represents West Germany at the Venice Biennale in Italy
1983 Featured in the group exhibition Expressions: New Art from Germany at the Saint Louis Art Museum
1987 Has first solo US museum exhibition, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art
1991 Visits St. Louis to install Breaking of the Vessels
1992 Moves from Germany to Barjac, France
2020 Commissioned by France to produce an installation for the Panthéon in Paris
2025 Saint Louis Art Museum opens Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea