"Gagosian's daring new Paris gallery is a delight. Both the architecture and location captivate and enchant me. Situated on the edge of an airfield--similar to my own studio in Croissy--airplanes arrive and depart while my works hang there. The pictures arrive, stay for a while, and, once seen, can leave again. This is the objective. The flights, the paintings, the comings, the goings. The space is so inspiring that you can envision the artworks in it immediately. It makes me think of the poem"Unter den Linden"(Under the Linden Trees) by Walther von der Vogelweide.

--Anselm Kiefer

'Under the lime trees
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest, Wtill you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed. Beside the forest in the vale,
Tándaradéi,
Sweetly sang the nightingale.'

Excerpt from Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170-1230) "Under den linden" (Under the lime trees) Translation by Raymond Oliver

In the fall of 2012, Gagosian Gallery will inaugurate a bold new gallery space at Le Bourget in the north of Paris with an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by the renowned German artist Anselm Kiefer. This is Kiefer's first exhibition with the gallery in Paris, following major exhibitions at Gagosian New York (1998, 2000, 2002, 2010), Gagosian Los Angeles (2008), and Gagosian Rome (2009).

Kiefer's monumental archive of human memory gives overt material presence to a broad range of cultural myths and metaphors, from the Old and New Testaments to the Kabbalah, from ancient Roman history to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. By constructing elaborate scenographies that fuse art and literature, painting and sculpture, Kiefer engages the complex events of history, the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos, and the fragile endurance of the sacred and the spiritual amid the ongoing destruction of the world. He integrates, expands, and regenerates imagery and techniques, emphasizing the importance of acts of imagination as a tool against forgetting our culture and history.

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany during the last year of World War II. After studying law, he began his art education in Karlsruhe and then Düsseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. His work has been shown in, and collected by, major museums throughout the world. Recent retrospective surveys include the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth (2005) (traveling to Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2007). In 2007 Kiefer inaugurated the "Monumenta" program at the Grand Palais, Paris with a vast site-specific installation of sculptures and paintings. In 2007, he became the first living artist to create a permanent installation at the Louvre since Georges Braque in 1953. In 2009, he directed and designed the sets for Am Anfang (In the Beginning) at the Opéra national de Paris. Kiefer lives and works in France.