“But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory,” the German artist Anselm Kiefer has said of his practice, “because my memory is my only homeland.” Famous for his monumental paintings and installations, Kiefer builds layers of historical reference into his work—an insistent form of remembering. He creates those layers with natural materials such as earth, lead, wood, sand, hay, and oil paint. Kiefer’s homeland, its history, comes to us though the lens of Germanic mythology and lore, aggression and lyricism. A dark palace. —E.C.