Anselm Kiefer is the artist of ruins. Of memory. Of war. Starting with the one he wages with his gigantic works. “While I paint, my pictures undergo destruction, repair, transmutation. I massacre them, I beat them up… My mind is at war. War is within me,” he confided to Vincenzo Trione in Prologo celeste – Nell’atelier di Anselm Kiefer. But now war is everywhere; from anguished memory, it then became an all-purpose to metaphor and has now returned to being raw news. The rubble, once the backdrop to his German childhood, has become the landscape of Gaza, of Ukrainian neighborhoods, and the destruction seems not to be stopping.