Never shown in public because of its size, Anselm Kiefer’s eleven-metre Schwarze Flocken now has a building of its own in Künzelsau, Germany, a concrete pavilion by David Chipperfield Architects.
Kiefer made Schwarze Flocken, or Black Flakes, in 2007, in his characteristic mixed media of oil, emulsion, shellac and earth, with twigs. The title comes from Paul Celan, a poet Kiefer keeps returning to, whose poem of the same name deals with the experience of the Holocaust. At 11 metres high and 7.10 metres wide, it is the largest Kiefer in the Würth Collection, which acquired it in 2008. Its pavilion sits beside Museum Würth 2, where the land lifts a little toward the south-western fringe of the Carmen Würth Forum’s grounds, and belongs to the Würth Sculpture Garden.
The building was Kiefer’s idea. He has commissioned other buildings for individual works before, Würth notes, and here the room came first: he fixed the inner volume, which the outline follows closely, along with the proportions, the size and placement of the door opening and the colour of the walls. Chipperfield’s Berlin office, author of the Carmen Würth Forum (2017) and Museum Würth 2 (2020), took that volume as given and kept the rest to a handful of carefully positioned elements. Built for Adolf Würth GmbH & Co. KG between May and September 2026, the pavilion covers 140 square metres.
A restrained portico shields the entrance from the weather and handles the passage from landscape to exhibition room. The walls are bush-hammered concrete, an echo of the Forum’s own material, turned here into a freestanding sculptural figure in the sculpture garden. Würth adds that the shell was cast in a slipform in a single pour, without joints, as one monolith, and its face was bush-hammered by hand until the shell-limestone aggregate, quarried nearby at Kupferzell-Rüblingen, showed through.
Unlike a conventional exhibition space, the room is, in the studio’s words, “not subject to strict climate control or lighting parameters”. Its wall is built in three layers: the concrete shell, highly insulating brickwork, and, on the room side, clay plaster that Würth describes as regulating. Together they are meant to cope with shifts in the weather and keep the room frost-free, with no active climate control. A painting made partly of earth now lives inside a lining of clay.
Overhead, solid timber beams laid crosswise stay fully exposed, and single fields between them open as rooflights. The daylight they admit is subdued and changes through the day and across the seasons. Uniform illumination is not the goal; the studio wants a light that “slows down the act of seeing and directs attention to the artwork”.
Kiefer, Reinhold Würth and Wolfram Weimer, the state minister for culture, attended the opening on 12 October 2026, and the public followed the next day. In his speech, Chipperfield spoke of Reinhold Würth’s “conviction that art should form part of everyday life, and even the working environment”. The pavilion puts that plainly: one painting, one room built to the painter’s own measure, open every day and free to anyone who walks up the rise.
