SLAM Presents First Major U.S. Anselm Kiefer Survey in Over 20 years
The Saint Louis Art Museum opens Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea on Oct 18, showcasing 40 works across five decades, including massive river paintings linking the Mississippi and the Rhine.
This fall, the Saint Louis Art Museum will crack open one of the most anticipated art events in the U.S. — the first major Anselm Kiefer survey here in over 20 years. Opening October 18, “Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea” will flood SLAM’s grand halls with 40 works spanning five decades, from early 1970s Neo-Expressionist fire to the towering river visions of his latest years.
The centerpiece: a collision of waters. Kiefer sets the Mississippi against the Rhine, drawing long, turbulent lines between continents, histories, and human migrations. In the Cass Gilbert–designed Main Building, four 30-foot paintings shimmer with verdigris, gold leaf, and water spirit figures — lighter in tone but no less monumental than the lead-heavy, battle-scarred canvases that made him famous.
Kiefer’s bond with St. Louis runs deep. In 1991, he drifted up the Mississippi to witness a new lock-and-dam system. Decades later, that memory resurfaces here, in paintings like Anselm fuit hic and Missouri, Mississippi, where the river is less geography than memory — mutable, political, eternal.
SLAM’s holdings already form one of the most important German postwar collections in America, bolstered by its historic trove of Max Beckmann works. This exhibition, curated by director Min Jung Kim, folds Kiefer’s name into that legacy. Alongside the river paintings are sculptures of ancient heroines — Eulalia, Thusnelda, Sappho — rendered in bronze, resin, leather, and glass.
It’s free to the public, but nothing about it is easy. Kiefer’s canvases confront the weight of borders, the cycles of destruction and renewal, the persistence of history. They don’t just hang on the walls — they bear down on you.
“Becoming the Sea” runs through January 25, 2026. Expect to leave changed.
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