Anselm Kiefer’s recent exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London offers an immersive exploration of landscape as an existential and symbolic field, reinvigorating a profound dialogue with Vincent van Gogh.
Rooted in a journey Kiefer undertook as a young artist retracing Van Gogh’s steps through Europe, these works highlight landscapes as vessels of philosophical inquiry and emotional depth.
In a striking series of sunflower paintings, Kiefer revisits Van Gogh’s iconic motif through a distinctively somber lens. His dense, layered impasto, devoid of Van Gogh’s characteristic luminosity, replaces vivid yellows with earthen hues and ashen tones, articulating a narrative steeped in melancholy. Kiefer weaves literary and mythological references, notably Blake’s poetry and the myth of Clytie, whose perpetual yearning for the sun encapsulates a poignant allegory of longing and loss. The sunflowers, burdened yet resolute, emerge anthropomorphic, their heavy heads capturing a mournful resilience.
Kiefer extends this exploration into photographic mediums, presenting spectral silver gelatin prints that deepen the thematic resonance of burden and temporality. These images, marked by sedimentary layers and spectral silhouettes, communicate an enduring tension between visibility and obscurity, the tangible and ephemeral.
Further embodying these dualities are Kiefer’s wheat field paintings, luminous yet shadowed by complexity. Embracing Van Gogh’s radiant palette, Kiefer infuses fields of golden wheat with nuanced reflections on cyclical regeneration and decay. The inclusion of gold leaf amplifies symbolic tensions, evoking both sacred reverence and the fraught impermanence embedded in nature’s cycles. A recurring motif—the scythe—underscores harvest’s duality of fecundity and mortality, while historical references, such as the Sichelschnitt, anchor landscapes in darker, human histories of violence and loss.
In a remarkable sculptural installation, Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder, Kiefer integrates poetic and alchemical symbolism. A suspended sunflower above a leaden book speaks directly to Goethe’s Faustian tensions between aspiration and downfall. The materiality—lead, dried vegetation, fragmented earth—fuses historical gravity with mythological resonance, amplifying the metaphysical dimension of Kiefer’s work.
