When Anselm Kiefer first traced Vincent van Gogh’s footsteps at 18, clutching a travel grant and a head full of visions, he found more than inspiration—he found a kindred spirit. Now, six decades later, the Royal Academy has staged an unprecedented conversation between the two, pairing Kiefer’s monumental, myth-laden works with Van Gogh’s feverish landscapes in a revelation of shared obsessions: crows circling wheat fields, the alchemy of texture, and landscapes that pulse with metaphysical weight.
The exhibition—the first UK pairing of these titans—unearths the Dutch master’s enduring grip on Kiefer’s practice. Van Gogh’s Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (1890) and Field of Irises near Arles (1888) will face Kiefer’s The Crows (2019) and Nevermore (2014), their high horizons and deep perspectives mirroring each other across time. But this is no mere homage; Kiefer’s surfaces—crackled with straw, gold leaf, and electrolytic sediment—transmute Van Gogh’s impasto into something darker and denser.
Rare drawings expose the roots of this dialogue. Kiefer’s youthful sketches, made on his Van Gogh pilgrimage, will hang near La Crau Seen from Montmajour (1888)—a masterwork of ink and autonomy, last seen in London half a century ago. And in a striking new sculpture, Kiefer plants a sunflower atop a tower of books, its seeds spilling onto leaden pages—a nod to Van Gogh’s Piles of French Novels (1887) and their shared reverence for literature.
The pièce de résistance? The Starry Night (2019), Kiefer’s answer to Van Gogh’s cosmos—not swirling paint, but gilded straw and industrial residue, collapsing the romantic into the apocalyptic. Here, influence becomes inheritance, and Van Gogh’s sunflowers, once symbols of hope, cast long shadows into Kiefer’s troubled present.
Born in 1945 amid the smouldering ruins of Nazi Germany, Anselm Kiefer wields art as an act of exorcism. His childhood in the Black Forest—where myth and history bled together—forged an artist who would spend a lifetime wrestling with the ghosts of collective trauma.
Rejecting the clean slate of postwar abstraction, Kiefer dragged history back into the gallery: lead books, charred landscapes, straw-strewn canvases thick with the weight of unspoken words. His 1969 Occupations series—photographs of the artist performing the Nazi salute across Europe—ignited controversy, establishing his lifelong refusal of easy absolution.
Materials became his medium of reckoning. Sunflowers sprout from molten lead; concrete towers crumble under the weight of forgotten poems. In Kiefer’s hands, paint isn’t applied—it’s excavated, layered like archaeological strata. The influence of Beuys (his teacher) and Celan (his literary compass) pulses through works that transmute shame into something stranger: a terrible beauty.
Now working in his sprawling Barjac studio complex—part Wagnerian stage set, part wasteland—Kiefer still mines the darkness. His recent sunflowers, gilded and grotesque, stretch toward a light that never quite arrives. – PCR