Credit: A. KIEFER/EDITIONS DU REGARD

“Your age and my age and the age of the world cannot be measured in years,” wrote Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann in her poem Das Spiel ist aus (The game is up). It is the sheer size of Anselm Kiefer's Sternenfall (Falling stars) installation in the restored Grand Palais in Paris that projects the visitor into the immeasurable.

The German artist is the first exhibitor in a new annual event called Monumenta. Each year, the Grand Palais will host a different artist to show work of monumental proportions. Kiefer's mega-installation, on view until 8 July 2007, reflects his interest in the astronomical sky.

Kiefer is among the most important contemporary artists. He gained notoriety in 1969, with his series of photographs entitled Besetzungen (Occupations), which depict the artist amongst European landscapes making the Hitlerian salute.

In 1993, he moved to the south of France. It was perhaps the vast, starry skies of his new home in Barjac that led him to contemplate the heavens, and the cosmic reality that we ourselves are born of stardust. He frequently uses sunflower seeds; the “heliotropic spiralling seed-head is a condensed 'negative print' of the starry night sky, a cosmos full of black stars”. He has also been influenced by the ideas of Robert Fludd, the sixteenth century thinker, that each plant on Earth has a celestial equivalent, and the human body is a condensed version of the cosmos. But alongside this mysticism, Kiefer makes full use of modern astronomy.

His Monumenta exhibition comprises seven cavernous 'houses' each containing one or many canvases, such as the 2001 painting Andromeda, illustrated here. On entry, the visitor is confronted with a pile of rubble, littered with books made of lead and the glass shards of fallen stars, each numbered from a recent star map. The rubble is that of a collapsed tower entitled Dashed Hope, one of three built from hollow concrete blocks. Of the other towers, one, the title piece of the exhibition, stands 17 metres high. The third tower, rising eight metres above the spectator, is called Sun Ship, evoking a giant vessel. An array of sunflowers, a solar motif, protrudes from the top.

Shortly before his death in 1986, Joseph Beuys, Kiefer's compatriot and fellow artist, told Keifer that through immense personal effort we can enter a domain “where cathedrals may be built”. In Monumenta, Kiefer not only enters that domain, but brings back souvenirs from the starry voyage.