International attention and a national shock were triggered by Anselm Kiefer in 1980 at the Venice Biennale with monumental, dark paintings titled Germany's Spiritual Heroes or Parsifal, which openly referenced the still young German past at that time. Confronting his own German history and capturing the "unspeakable" in images or symbols remained Kiefer's primary artistic concern well into the 1990s, ultimately leading him back to the sources of human history: to Gnosis and Kabbalah, Christian and Jewish mysticism, Nordic myths, cosmic designs, and alchemical knowledge, as well as to the philosophical and poetic literature of all cultures and centuries. Today, the work of the artist, born in 1945 in Donaueschingen and living in France since 1993, is among the most impressive of his generation.