Exhibitions

Anselm Kiefer

Valencia, Spain

Anselm Kiefer doesn’t paint landscapes to make them beautiful. He turns them into memory — heavy with history, myth, ruins, ash, flowers, and time.

Anselm Kiefer Walhalla
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Image credit

© CAHH, Anselm Kiefer Walhalla (2015-2017)

Meet the artist

The Movement

Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture

ArtLovers Tip

Stand in front of one work until it stops looking like a painting and starts feeling like a place. Kiefer’s power is that he makes history physical — not as a lesson, but as weight, texture, silence and material. In Valencia, let the works feel heavy. That heaviness is the point.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

Kiefer’s work is known for its monumental scale and dense materials, often connecting earth, architecture, poetry, trauma and myth. In Valencia, the exhibition focuses strongly on landscape, while also opening into the themes that define his practice: history, mythology and literature.

This is not a conventional white-cube exhibition. The CAHH has reconfigured six galleries to host Kiefer’s work, including pieces from the Hortensia Herrero Collection and works coming directly from the artist’s studio.

You’re watching:

  • Monumental works where landscape becomes a site of memory
  • Thick, physical surfaces that feel closer to earth, ash, metal, straw and ruin than to traditional painting
  • A dialogue between beauty and destruction
  • Mythological and literary references transformed into matter
  • Large-scale works from the Hortensia Herrero Collection, including Böse Blumen (Evil Flowers), Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) and Walhalla
  • Danaë, a monumental work more than 13 metres wide, shown in Europe for the first time according to regional tourism sources.

The exhibition feels like entering a world after history has passed through it — a place where beauty survives, but never innocently

Worth the trip

Yes — especially if you want to see a major international artist in a site-specific museum context outside the usual European capitals.

This matters because it is Kiefer’s first exhibition in Valencia and the first temporary exhibition programme of the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero. It positions the CAHH as a serious contemporary art destination, not only a private collection space.

Kiefer’s work needs scale, silence and physical presence. Seeing it across six galleries in Valencia gives the exhibition the intensity of a journey: landscape, ruin, myth, architecture, memory.

For Artlovers, this is one of those exhibitions that can turn a city visit into a reason to travel.

How to experience it

Don’t rush: Kiefer’s works are built for slow looking.

Step back first — scale is part of the emotional impact.

Then move close — the surface is where the story becomes physical.

Look for contrasts: flowers and death, gold and ash, myth and history, beauty and destruction.

Read the landscape not as scenery, but as a witness.

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