Würth Opens a Pavilion for Anselm Kiefer’s Black Flakes in Künzelsau

The Würth Collection has opened a pavilion in Künzelsau, north-east of Stuttgart, for Schwarze Flocken (Black Flakes), the largest work it owns by Anselm Kiefer, the German painter and sculptor. The canvas, 11.2 metres high and 7.1 metres wide, has been on public view since 13 October in a freestanding building beside Museum Würth 2. Reinhold Würth, the entrepreneur who built the collection, bought it from Kiefer’s studio in 2008, and for 18 years none of the collection’s exhibition spaces was large enough to show it. The pavilion is open daily from 10am to 6pm, and entry is free.

The title comes from a poem by Paul Celan, one of the major German-language poets of the 20th century, which reflects his experience of the Holocaust. The Würth Collection describes the painting as a work about history and myth, destruction and rebuilding. Kiefer painted it in 2007 in oil, emulsion, shellac and earth on canvas, with branches attached.

●In brief

The building. David Chipperfield Architects designed the pavilion to Kiefer’s brief. Kiefer asked for a freestanding building and specified its proportions, the size and placement of the doorway and the colour of the walls. The concrete pavilion covers 140 square metres and has a portico and skylights. The Würth Group commissioned it in 2025. The practice’s Berlin office also designed Museum Würth 2 and the Carmen Würth Forum on the same site.

The opening. Wolfram Weimer, Germany’s minister of state for culture and the media, inaugurated the pavilion on 12 October and called it a real asset to Germany’s cultural life. “Anselm Kiefer’s monumental art shows how deeply history reaches into the present,” Weimer said.

The exhibition. The Kunsthalle Würth in Schwäbisch Hall reopened in its 25th anniversary year, after a three-year renovation, with a Kiefer exhibition of its own. Anselm Kiefer: Alles, was der Fall ist (Everything That Is the Case) runs from 16 October 2026 to 3 October 2027 and brings together just over 70 works from every phase of his career, drawn from the Würth Collection and from the artist’s studio.

●Why it matters

The pavilion was built around a single painting. Kiefer proposed the building and fixed its proportions, doorway and wall colours, so the room follows the dimensions of Schwarze Flocken. The Würth Collection notes that Kiefer has built freestanding pavilions for several of his works before. In Künzelsau, that approach now has a permanent site that is open to the public every day.

Reinhold Würth owned the painting for 18 years before he could show it. When he finally commissioned a building for it, he let the artist define the room, and he opened the pavilion free of charge in Künzelsau, the home of the Würth Group in Baden-Württemberg. Wolfram Weimer thanked the Würth family at the opening for making art of international standing accessible to a broad public.

The Würth Collection is showing Anselm Kiefer at two scales, in a pavilion and an exhibition that opened within a week of each other in October 2026. In Künzelsau, the pavilion shows a single painting, Schwarze Flocken, in a room built for it. At the Kunsthalle Würth in Schwäbisch Hall, Anselm Kiefer: Alles, was der Fall ist brings together just over 70 works from every phase of his career, drawn from the collection and from the artist’s studio. It runs until 3 October 2027.

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