A giant Anselm Kiefer painting that has spent almost two decades in storage is now finally on view to the public following the opening of a purpose-built gallery in Germany. The German industrialist and collector Reinhold Würth bought Kiefer’s Schwarze Flocken (Black Flakes, 2007), which is 11.2m high and 7.1m wide, directly from the artist’s studio in 2008. With the painting simply too large for any of the Würth Collection’s exhibition spaces, in 2025 the Würth Group commissioned the British architect David Chipperfield, working closely with Kiefer, to design a pavilion exclusively for Black Flakes. It opened on 13 October in the sculpture garden beside Museum Würth 2 in Künzelsau, northeast of Stuttgart.
Made with oil, emulsion, shellac, earth and branches on canvas, Black Flakes takes its title from a poem by Paul Celan, the Romanian Jewish poet whose parents died in Nazi camps during the Holocaust. Kiefer has often drawn on Celan’s poetry as he explores German history and memory in his works.
“The result is a wonderful solution: the work now has a fitting and permanent home,” Maria Würth, Reinhold’s granddaughter and the group’s executive vice-president for arts and culture, tells The Art Newspaper. “The pavilion creates an atmosphere that slows the act of looking and focuses attention entirely on the artwork. Here, in the presence of Paul Celan, to whom Black Flakes is dedicated, three masters meet as equals: Chipperfield, Kiefer and Celan.”
Kiefer himself proposed the freestanding pavilion and specified the room’s proportions, the doorway’s size and position and the wall colours. Chipperfield’s Berlin office translated these requirements into a 140 sq. m concrete building. A sheltered portico marks the transition from the surrounding landscape into the gallery, while roof lights admit natural light.
“Our task was to find the architectural response to it: to create a space that is entirely oriented towards a single work of art, while developing a quiet sculptural identity,” Bernhard Danigel, a design lead and associate at David Chipperfield Architects Berlin, tells The Art Newspaper. “The architecture needed to give the work room to exist without competing with its presence.”
The pavilion’s opening coincides with the reopening of another Würth museum, Kunsthalle Würth, in Schwäbisch Hall, around 20km from Künzelsau, following a three-year renovation and expansion that added 600 sq. m of exhibition space. Its 25th-anniversary exhibition, Anselm Kiefer—All That Is the Case (Alles, was der Fall ist, until 3 October 2027), includes more than 70 works from the Würth Collection and 21 loans from the artist’s studio.