Latest news with #AnselmKiefer
Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for June 2025
Below is a round-up of the best art our critics have seen in recent months across the UK. From Renaissance chalk sketches to rotting apples, miniatures and Picasso prints, it's a varied list. Which exhibitions have you enjoyed recently? Let us know in the comments. Resistance — Steve McQueen leads us on a voyage of discovery Turner Contemporary, Margate From the militant suffrage movement in 1903 to the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003, when it matters, we march. This Turner Contemporary exhibition, Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest, curated by the artist and film director Steve McQueen, is a fascinating, deeply researched, if low-key look at a century of protest in Britain through photography. To Jun 1, ND Read our review Edvard Munch Portraits — the Scream painter shows his social side National Portrait Gallery, London Edvard Munch's forensic powers are on full display in the first British exhibition to focus solely on his portraits. Known for his 'subject' paintings, which cast friends and family as the dramatis personae in tableaux that communicate a universal emotion (The Scream being the most famous), he was also a prolific portraitist. To Jun 15, ND Anselm Kiefer: Early Works — an artist under the shadow of the Nazis Ashmolean, Oxford It's one hell of a moment for an exhibition of the early works of Anselm Kiefer. It was probably conceived as celebratory — the German artist's 80th birthday lands on March 8; this show at the Ashmolean opens just before an unprecedented presentation across two Amsterdam museums, the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk. But with the rise of the AfD in Germany, and a shift to the right across Europe, a return to these works, created between 1969 and 1982, has suddenly become urgent. To Jun 15, ND COURTESY NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 — an unmissable National Gallery hit National Gallery The show focuses on four painters — Duccio, Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti — to reveal them as pioneers, and uses textiles and finely wrought items such as carved ivories and richly decorated reliquaries to show how these four artists were nurtured by this European centre for trade. It is a stunner. London, to Jun 22, ND Andy Warhol: Portrait of America — depicting a dark side to the USA MK Gallery, Milton Keynes This exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, put together from the Artist Rooms collection, goes back to basics in an elegant primer showing how Andy Warhol — uniquely and incisively — held up a mirror to postwar consumerist America. It takes a chronological, rather than thematic, approach. Each room represents a decade, from his days as a commercial artist in the 1950s to the 1980s (he died in 1987). To Jun 29, ND Victor Hugo's The Cheerful Castle, 1847, on show at the Royal Academy PARIS MUSÉES/MAISONS DE VICTOR HUGO PARIS-GUERNESEY Astonishing Things: Drawings of Victor Hugo — strange and marvellous Royal Academy, London Though many of us won't actually have read either of the 19th-century writer Victor Hugo's most famous novels (Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), there's a chance that we've all seen at least one of them, either on film or on stage. Very few will be familiar with the body of work now on display — his strange and marvellous drawings. To Jun 29, ND Read our review Bob Dylan — the musician is a good painter Halcyon Gallery, London There will be people who pooh-pooh yet another exhibition of paintings by Bob Dylan as just another rock star's dabblings. But over the past 20 years (he started exhibiting in 2007 at the Chemnitz art museum in Germany) he has developed into a rather good, interesting painter. To Jul 6, ND Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern is a fascinating homage to an Eighties icon Tate Modern, London Through artworks by his friends and peers (including portraits by Lucian Freud), garments (or 'Looks') from his archive, films, postcards, sketches, letters, magazines and what feels like hundreds of photographs, we follow the journey of a suburban Melbourne lad. It's a story that runs from his arrival in London in 1980, fresh out of fashion college, through his entry to the scene, his impact on clubland, his work with the choreographer Michael Clark and his shift into performance. To Aug 31, ND Hiroshige — an entrancing trip to 19th-century Japan British Museum, London Utagawa Hiroshige is among the very most popular — not to mention prolific — artists in Japan. Yet to many of us he may be familiar only through the work of his most famous fan in the West. Vincent van Gogh was a passionate admirer, which is why some of the images that now go on display at the British Museum may start ringing bells. To Sep 7, Rachel Campbell-Johnston Giuseppe Penone — breathe in the scent of nature Serpentine Gallery, London The idea of breath as sculpture has always interested Penone, and though he's never quite managed to make that work, he symbolises it here with a set of lungs formed from golden branches. Not every work here speaks clearly, but something about the show as a whole evokes an inexplicable wish to linger, basking in the restfulness that permeates the galleries. And then you realise that, just beyond the doors, there's a whole 275 acres of nature. Time to get into it. To Sep 7, ND Read our review Do Ho Suh — an exquisite meditation on the perfect home Tate Modern, London At Tate Modern, the great Korean artist Do Ho Suh has fashioned hundreds from colour-coded fabric according to the places he's inhabited, and installed them on four transparent panels modelled on his present London abode. The effect is at once playful and haunting, a ghostly meeting of places and time zones that poses questions about the meaning of home. To Oct 19, Chloe Ashby Read our review Ancient India: Living Traditions — gods and rituals come to life British Museum, London Considering the sheer size of the country, you might expect an exhibition entitled Ancient India: Living Traditions to be a sprawling mess. However, it's surprisingly compact, perhaps because if they were to go big, we'd have to go home well before we got to the end. May 22 to Oct 19, Nancy Durrant Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur — a mischievous romp Wallace Collection, London Grayson Perry does not love the Wallace Collection. The decadence, the grandeur, the conspicuous expense trigger his snobbery. It was a sticking point when he was invited to create an exhibition of new work responding to the collection. So Perry conjured someone to love the Wallace for him: Shirley Smith, a fictional artist, inspired by Madge Gill, a real 'outsider artist'' who exhibited at the Wallace during the Second World War — a woman who suffered traumatic events but found solace (and acclaim) through art. To Oct 26, ND Read our review Liliane Lijn — first major show for the 85-year-old Tate St Ives Now 85, and having lived in London since 1966, it seems bizarre that Liliane Lijn's Arise Alive exhibition at Tate St Ives is the New York-born artist's first major solo survey show in a UK museum. It's not as if she's an unknown. In the late 1950s she knocked about with ageing surrealists Max Ernst and André Breton in Paris, a rare, prominent and much younger woman in that rather bitchy scene (some of her intricate, dreamy Sky Scrolls drawings from this period indicate a fascination with that surrealist staple, the unconscious). Right now, one of her kinetic pieces has its own room in the Electric Dreams exhibition at Tate Modern. This, though, is all her. To Nov 2, ND Seeing Each Other — Freud, Bacon, Emin and Kahlo all join the party Pallant House, Chichester Looking is what artists do. But at what? At each other, endlessly, on the evidence of this new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which looks back over 125 years at the ways that artists working in Britain have portrayed each other. To Nov 2, Nancy Durrant Read our review JMW Turner's Upnor Castle, Kent,1831-2 THE WHITWORTH, THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER Turner: In Light and Shade — a gorgeous display of astonishing scenes Whitworth, Manchester John Ruskin was a funny old stick, but when it came to his hero JMW Turner, whose 250th birthday falls this year, he really knew what he was talking about. 'He paints in colour, but he thinks in light and shade,' he wrote in 1843, and in this exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester, which focuses on Turner's prints — in particular the Liber Studiorum series, which, despite the gallery's significant Turner holdings, hasn't been shown here in full since 1922 — this is borne out gloriously. To Nov 2, ND Read our review Making Egypt — much more than mummies Young V&A, London For its older or younger visitors, the V&A's remit is not simply the history of the past but also its interaction with the design of the present. So in Making Egypt, alongside old fabrics are new dresses; alongside ancient stone carvings are modern ones made with the same techniques. As much space is given for the practice sketches of an ancient scribe — working out how to depict owls and cats and hieroglyphs — as for the finished result. To Nov 2, Tom Whipple Read our review Cartier — dazzled by diamonds in a five-star show V&A, London Curators have kept it simple for this dazzling show, just a lot of exquisite objects of outstanding beauty, quality and ingenuity alongside occasional drawings from the Cartier archives to illustrate their development, all mostly spotlit against black. To Nov 12, ND Pirates — the bloody truth behind Captain Pugwash
New European
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
The flowering of Anselm Kiefer
Now, more than 60 years on, two exhibitions in Amsterdam and one in Oxford are showing the work of Anselm Kiefer, covering his early, mature and most recent output. Arguably the most significant living artist, Kiefer's work is constantly arresting and alarming, while often consoling and unashamedly beautiful. Kiefer calls history an artist's material, 'just as clay is to a sculptor and paint is to a painter'. At 18, a serious-minded young German from Donaueschingen, a town in the Black Forest near the Swiss border, set out across France, Belgium and the Netherlands. He had been born in 1945, the year those lands were beginning to emerge from the nightmare of Nazi occupation. The first recipient of a new travel scholarship for young artists, the young Anselm Kiefer may have travelled light, but he carried with him what he would often refer to in later life as the weight of history. The Amsterdam exhibitions take their title from the 1956 song by Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? The written text – 'Where have all the soldiers gone?'; 'Where have all the graves gone?' – sprawls across the works that surround the top of the great staircase in the Stedelijk Museum. The five floor-to-ceiling pieces that tower over the visitor are on a monumental scale, typical of Kiefer's latest and greatest works. Images from Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum Images from Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum Images from Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum Technically these are canvases, thick with verdigris paint and made sculptural with applied objects, stuck to the canvases like giant collages. Ranks of spattered, degraded uniforms hang from rusting hangers, and some of them would only fit a child. Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk, introduced the artist and his work, with its 'weight of the past and uncertainties of the future', two days before Kiefer's 80th birthday. 'When the world order seems to be unstable it's important to think about other unstable world orders,' said Wolfs. 'It's important to use history to explain what's happening today.' What's happening today wasn't happening when the exhibitions were in the making – not all of it, anyway. But Kiefer's practice is rooted in the trauma of a childhood in postwar Germany. The burden of his father, in particular – an officer in the Wehrmacht – was always present in his art. Threat, decay and destruction burn from the vast canvases, but glowing in the embers is always the promise of regeneration. The young Kiefer's European journey followed in the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh. There are obvious synergies between the two artists, notably in the paradox of the sunflower: at its most glorious and spectacular the sun-seeking flower head is on the point of corruption and collapse. Kiefer depicts the sunflowers in paint and has also stuck withered flowers to the canvases. Dull, dark seeds will fall to the ground from bowed and blackened heads – but each enfolds a drop of precious oil, and carries the promise of a new crop of breathtaking beauty, mobile, radiant and strong. The flowers of the joint exhibitions' title, however, are interpreted by the artist as roses. Pink and crimson petals are scattered on the floor around the Stedelijk installation, some with just the ghost of a fragrance, but all drained of their former voluptuousness, as they crackle under the feet of heedless gallery-goers. Curators are realistic about human nature. Petals will disappear in pockets and bags, to be replaced by patient gallery staff. Everyone wants a piece of Anselm Kiefer. 'Only these are not Anselm Kiefer,' says Wolfs. After his youthful Van Gogh pilgrimage, Kiefer confronted his country's – and his own family's – past by posing in his father's old uniform, giving the same stiff-armed salute that has become newly and distastefully fashionable among certain ultra right wing Americans. Some of the resulting images can be seen in a third Kiefer exhibition, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. These acts of contrition – atoning for the sins of the fathers – seem to liberate Kiefer, not from his share of Germany's collective memory, but from its negative force. From now on, his images will defer to nature's positive energy. 'My personal history did not start in the Third Reich,' he says, 'it stretches back much further… I don't view history in a linear way: it repeats itself and we find the same structures and patterns in other cultures, too, such as the Incas. History seems to me instead to be something that widens the further back we go.' Like his sunflowers, in Kiefer's early work lie the seeds of what is to come over the ensuing six decades. Certain leitmotifs will recur over and over. Meanwhile the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam juxtaposes Kiefer's works with those of their own man, and this emphasises the fact that Kiefer seldom strays far from landscape in its broadest sense. Drawings of rural scenes that date from the 18-year-old's expedition demonstrate that, notwithstanding the sheer scale and abundance of his later works, in some ways he is a landscape artist at heart. For decades, in works that are loaded with meaning and symbolism, the sky is always up there, the land down there, and the natural order goes undisturbed and unimproved upon. In 1992, having worked for 20 years in Odenwald, latterly in a former brickworks, Kiefer left Germany and set up a colossal new studio in a disused silk factory in Barjac, Provence. Here he creates installations on an industrial scale, but also cultivates sunflowers using seed brought back from Japan during two years of extensive travels across Asia – during which, he says, he did no painting. The experience also led to a rethink: 'I needed a change for my work, and it is easier to change if you go away,' he told Das Kunstmagazin in 2001. 'The horizon has disappeared and the materials are clearer.' Kiefer has no time for abstract art, he writes in the catalogue for the Amsterdam shows. 'I find completely abstract art, for example by Wassily Kandinsky, boring and vacuous. I prefer abstract art that retains a hint of representation, like those paintings by Kandinsky in which the transition to abstraction is still discernible, where the struggle is still visible.' There is no doubt that the later artist appreciates a good struggle, especially if it is natural forces that are at work. In Hemlock Cup (2019), the life has been bleached out of fertile land by the toxic plant that gives German its own version of 'poisoned chalice' – Schierlingsbecher or beaker of hemlock. Farmland under attack is a common motif. The birds that wheel over Die Krähen (The Crows, 2024) resemble a squadron of fighter jets, their outstretched talons like landing gear. You settle into the luxurious gold leaf in the skyline of Under the Lime Tree on the Heath (2019) before noticing a sticky red patch, like a telltale bloodstain at a crime scene. Sometimes the land gets its own back. Also in 2019, the greedy farmer in The Last Load, based, says Kiefer, on a folk tale, collapses under the weight of the grain, having wrested too much from the earth. Kiefer's connection to Van Gogh stretches from the soil to the sky. His O Stalks of the Night, with its reference to a Paul Celan poem and its satellites of gold and indigo, echoes Van Gogh's starry nights. Kiefer's own Starry Night is another undisguised tribute, with constellations of gilded straw and moons of chaff in a sky of aquamarine. But rarely in this natural world is there a recognisable being. A rare exception is the snake that winds through the fuselage of a small jet plane, a creature that can shed one skin and start a new life, while man is represented solely by the memoir of an adventurer. Lead has become a powerfully suggestive material for Kiefer. Having already discovered its potential and alchemic symbolism, he bought lead sheets discarded during the restoration of Cologne Cathedral. Journey to the End of the Night was first shown in 1990 and continues to make a stomach-turning impact, occupying an entire room. Its title is that of a controversial novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who held antisemitic and fascist views. The sense of a crash landing and the absence of humanity make this a chilling object. Unlike the natural world, it has no built-in regeneration. For that, the viewer looks to the fields and skies recreated on the walls. When Kiefer asks the question, 'Where have all the flowers gone?', he answers it himself, in his art. The flowers are destroyed, like so much life, by warfare. And although we have learned that, we have not learned to keep the peace. Anselm Kiefer – Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is at the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, until June 9. Versions of the exhibitions are at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, June 28 to October 26 and at White Cube, Mason's Yard, London, June 25 to August 16. Anselm Kiefer – Early Works is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until June 15
Forbes
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
German Artist Anselm Kiefer Engages In Visceral Dialogue With Van Gogh In Blockbuster Exhibition Sprawling Two Amsterdam Museums
Anselm Kiefer, The Starry Night, 2019, emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, straw, gold leaf, wood, ... More wire, sediment of an electrolysis on canvas, 470 x 840 cm Re-imagine the night sky, simultaneously tranquil and disquieting, as straw, gold leaf, wood, wire, and sediment mimic thick, impasto brushstrokes to pay homage to one of art history's most captivating swirls. The unusual materials, interacting with emulsion, and oil and acrylic paints, borrow from Post-Impressionist exploration of light and color to depict verisimilitude of nature. German artist Anselm Kiefer named his work De sterrennacht (The Starry Night) (2019) after Vincent van Gogh's painting executed from the Dutch master's east-facing window view during his yearlong stay at the asylum (psychiatric hospital) of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. 'What you see here is Kiefer working on a very grand scale, using his entire arsenal of materials. The green is created by electrolysis, he's using a lot of gold right now, and it is really about how he's getting out the movement in the Starry Night in an almost overwhelming way,' Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum, said during a tour of the exhibition following the previews of TEFAF-Maastricht. 'These works are also clearly looking to Van Gogh.' Van Gogh's influence permeates Kiefer's career, and is most evident in this colossal painting, stretching nearly 28 feet long and soaring more than 15 feet high. Sag mir wo die Blumen sind presents a wide range of Kiefer's work displayed across the Stedelijk Museum – showcasing his early works from the museum's own collection together for the first time, along with recent paintings and two new installations – and the Van Gogh Museum highlighting his lifelong dialogue with van Gogh. The name of the exhibition, German for Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, is borrowed from the eponymous 1955 anti-war song, originally written and performed by American folk singer Pete Seeger, who was inspired by the traditional Cossack folk song 'Koloda-Duda" (Колода-дуда in Russian) while reading Mikhail Sholokhov's novel in four volumes, Quiet Flows the Don. Some of us may be more familiar with Marlene Dietrich's recordings of the Seeger song in English, French, and German. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder On view through June 9, the sprawling exhibition is drawing global crowds, and it's wise to purchase tickets in advance. If you'll be in Amsterdam this spring, consider this a can't-miss inquiry into Kiefer's singular artistic process and robust creative relationship with van Gogh. Kiefer's visceral oeuvre – spanning monumental paintings, sculptures, installations, woodcuts, artists' books, works on paper, and films – confronts his childhood amid the rubble and contrition of postwar Germany. He denounced the pettiness and peril of nationalism, depicting the desecrated landscape and architecture and embracing the ambit of emotions that resonated with viewers around the world. Complexities are woven into intricate Kiefer's work, referencing literature, poetry, philosophy, mythology, scientific theory, and mysticism, amplified by the technical layering of his massive canvases and installations. Lead, straw, sand, charred wood, dried flowers, books, concrete, branches, ashes, and clothing lend to the visual narratives which reject any objective truth to history. Memory – individual and collective – was central to redefining national identity and public discourse in the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust, creating a new paradigm of memory politics which continues to inform our opinion of a dark chapter of history that's still fresh to survivors and resonates amid ongoing geopolitical horrors. Anselm Kiefer, Innenraum, 1981, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, theartist, 287.5 × 311cm, ... More collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam A skylight eerily illuminates the lurid grit of Kiefer's sinister Innenraum (1981), derived from a photograph of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Adolf Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer, plunging us into the abyss of inhumanity. 'In the early 1980s it was still difficult when he came up with his Nazi criticism. He was also provocative. In the early 1970s he was doing performances in which he was wearing the Nazi uniform of his father. And this was, of course, not well (received) in Germany, and this caused quite a disturbance. For him, it was a critique. It was making a fool of Nazism, in a way. But in the Netherlands, he found a very good ground with collectors and with museum directors, especially here at the Stedelijk,' said Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk. Anselm Kiefer, Steigend, steigend, sinkenieder, 2024 .Courtesy of the artist & White Cube. Shock and awe define the experience of navigating Kiefer's uncanny, enormous works, and Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder (Rising, rising, sinking down), a site-specific installation made from lead and photograph for the exhibition, magnifies the wow-factor. Imaging the hours of wrangling with the heavy metal (lead has a density of 708 pounds per cubic foot) to assemble this astonishing installation is exhausting, creating a genuine immersive experience where we surrender to the many memories emblazoned on the black-and-white photographs evoking myriad emotions. This glorious monstrosity epitomizes organized chaos and forces us look beyond the surface, temping us to crawl inside. Van Gogh continues to enthrall the global art world. M.S. Rau of New Orleans sold the rare Still Life with Two Sacks and a Bottle by van Gogh (asking price of $4.75 million) to a private collector at the 38th edition of TEFAF Maastricht, which is widely regarded as the world's preeminent fair for fine museum quality art, antiques, design and jewelry. Press preview of Sag mir wo die Blumen sind at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, March5,2025. Below ... More left: Anselm Kiefer, to the right: director Rein Wolfs. More from this year's TEFAF Maastricht: Exquisite Couples Delight At Breathtaking TEFAF Maastricht Preview Rediscovered Pioneering Portrait Painter Lotte Laserstein Rises At TEFAF Maastricht
Washington Post
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
This shocking sculpture invokes both Nazi delirium and Jewish theology
Great Works, In Focus • #188 This shocking sculpture invokes both Nazi delirium and Jewish theology Anselm Kiefer's seven-ton 'Breaking of the Vessels' is one of the artist's many manic dissections of German history. Expand the image Click to zoom in Column by Sebastian Smee March 13, 2025 at 11:10 a.m. EDT 10 minutes ago 3 min 0 It's a shocking thing to come across in an art museum. Anselm Kiefer's 'Breaking of the Vessels,' installed in the cavernous central hallway at the St. Louis Art Museum, looms over you like some ravaged altarpiece or charred library. The floor all around it is covered with broken glass. What on earth has happened here? What are we looking at? Is it a new thing in the world — or a terribly old thing, the residue of a long-past catastrophe? Kiefer is the kind of artist who wants to overwhelm you — not only with his blasted materials but also with thickening webs of correspondence, underground cathedrals of meaning. (St. Louis Art Museum is mounting a major Kiefer exhibition in October.) His works link modern literature, technology and political trauma with ancient mythology, religious scripture, cosmology and alchemy. Story continues below advertisement Formally, 'Breaking of the Vessels,' which weighs over seven tons, evokes the classical, foursquare integrity and teeming, scale-scrambled malevolence of Auguste Rodin's 'The Gates of Hell.' It's really a kind of bookcase, and it bears the weight of a bunch of Brobdingnagian book folios made from lead and broken glass. Lead markers project from the sides, linked together by meandering copper wires. A semicircular pane of glass suspended overhead has the Hebrew words 'Ain Soph Aur' — or infinite light — scrawled on it. This and Kiefer's title hint at one way of understanding the sculpture. According to Jewish kabbalistic tradition, attributes of God's light were divided among 10 vessels, but the vessels were not strong enough to contain them. When they broke, God's light — his divinity — entered our imperfect world. But Kiefer was a boy during World War II. And so he wants us to think less metaphysically, more historically. The books themselves suggest the centrality of learning to Jewish culture. Their ravaged look and the shattered glass call to mind the Nazis' book burning and then Kristallnacht, the wild rumpus of irrational violence that broke out in November 1938, when Nazi paramilitary officers and civilians smashed thousands of synagogues and storefronts of Jewish-owned businesses. Kiefer has always been infatuated with the poetry of ruins. Rubble piles up relentlessly in his work. He often abandons his sculptures and paintings to the elements or stashes them in dark shipping containers. He has strafed some works with bullets. Others he burns, slashes or buries. He lays canvases on the ground so he can pour paint and diluted acid onto them. He places sculptures made from lead in electrolyte baths where they are left to corrode. Behind Kiefer's creative destruction, I detect a kind of mania that puts me uncomfortably in mind of the Nazi delirium. The scope of his art, bursting with poetic and spiritual allusions, can render the specificity of what happened to particular individuals in particular traumatic circumstances almost negligible — as if actual people were mere grist to the mill of Kiefer's careening metaphysics. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement But still, I find his work enthralling. By embracing decay, by toying with ruins, Kiefer is trying, I think, to solve the problem of the 'merely' aesthetic. When I see 'Breaking of the Vessels,' for instance, I feel I'm no longer in a museum looking at 'art.' I suddenly see not just the false aesthetic moment ('false' in the sense that art is always trying to set itself apart from life) but the larger, shattering sweep of life, and the ruins of our ongoing history.
South China Morning Post
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Unique takes on Van Gogh's Starry Night, Sunflowers by German artist on show in Amsterdam
When he was just 17 years old, German artist Anselm Kiefer retraced the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh from the Netherlands through Belgium and into France. Advertisement Now, more than half a century later, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is joining forces for the first time with the neighbouring Stedelijk modern and contemporary art museum to stage a blockbuster exhibition of Kiefer's work, titled 'Sag mir wo die Blumen sind', a reference to folk singer Pete Seeger's iconic pacifist anthem 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' Kiefer said he did not set out to make an exclusively anti-war exhibition, even though he closely follows world events, including the conflict triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 'I don't say, 'I do now an exhibition against the war.' This I don't do because this is a programme; I'm not a programmatic artist,' he said. 'I do what is in me, what has to come out. And that is about all kinds of things, about the dead, about the war.' Anselm Kiefer talks during a press preview of an exhibition of his works at the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands on March 5, 2025. Photo: AP Kiefer's sometimes bleak work, which is rooted in his growing up in post-World War II Germany, might not immediately feel related to Van Gogh's vibrant and richly coloured landscapes and vases of sunflowers.
