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Arts feature

'I like vanished things': Anselm Kiefer on art, alchemy and his childhood

Martin Gayford talks to a surprisingly jolly Kiefer in advance of a major new Royal Academy retrospective

20 September 2014

9:00 AM

20 September 2014

9:00 AM

At the entrance to Anselm Kiefer’s forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy visitors will encounter a typically paradoxical Kiefer object: a giant pile of lead books, sprouting wings. When I asked Kiefer to explain this strange object, he immediately — and characteristically — began talking about alchemy.

Lead, of course, was the material from which alchemists hoped to make gold.

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Anselm Kiefer opens at the Royal Academy on 27 September.

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