Heaven is a bleak place for Anselm Kiefer.

In one of the largest retrospectives of the revered German artist, featured this summer at the Hirshhorn, Heaven and Earth reevaluates Kiefer’s thirty-year career in terms of the futile struggle to transcend the mundane and reach towards the heavenly. Yet in Kiefer’s imagining, we never quite get there, hovering, instead, in the murky ether of his canvas.

Best known for his dark commentary on German culture and identity in the aftermath of World War II, Kiefer’s stormy compositions draw on German expressionism, Christian, Greek and Jewish mythology, alchemy, and astronomy to create rich reinterpretations of German history. But Kiefer is not only commenting on German history; he is trying to crawl out from beneath its long and sordid shadow.