Anselm Kiefer has produced a diverse body of work comprising of painting, sculpture and installation that has made him one of the most important European artists of the past four decades. After studying law, and Romance languages and literature, Kiefer devoted himself entirely to painting. He attended the School of Fine Arts at Fribourg-in-Brisgau, then the Art Academy in Karlsruhe, while maintaining contact with Joseph Beuys, but soon began to develop his own deliberately indigenous set of subjects and symbols that he used to explore the fraught territory of German history and identity. He has exhibited widely, including solo shows at MoMA, New York (1987); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1991); The Metropolitan Museum, New York (1998); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006); Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; the Grand Palais, Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007); and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2011). In 2007, Kiefer became the first artist to be commissioned to install a permanent work at the Louvre, Paris since Georges Braque some 50 years earlier. He has lived and worked in France since 1993.