AMSTERDAM – When he was simply 17 years outdated, German artist Anselm Kiefer retraced the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh from the Netherlands by means of Belgium and into France.
Now, greater than half a century later, the museum named for the Dutch grasp is becoming a member of forces for the primary time with the neighboring Stedelijk fashionable and modern artwork museum in Amsterdam to stage a blockbuster exhibition of Kiefer’s work, titled “Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” a reference to people singer Pete Seeger’s iconic pacifist anthem “The place have all of the flowers gone?”
Kiefer mentioned he didn’t got down to make an solely anti-war exhibition, though he carefully follows world occasions together with the battle triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I don’t say ‘I do now an exhibition in opposition to the conflict.’ This I don’t do as a result of it is a program; I’m not a programmatic artist,” he mentioned. “I do what’s in me, what has to return out. And that’s about all types of issues, concerning the lifeless, concerning the conflict.”
Kiefer’s typically bleak work, rooted in rising up in post-World Conflict II Germany, may not instantly really feel carefully associated to Van Gogh’s vibrant and richly coloured landscapes and vases of sunflowers.
However check out Kiefer’s 2019 “The Crows,” alongside Van Gogh’s 1890 “Wheatfield with Crows,” and the inspiration for the German’s work jumps from the wall.
The brooding black birds aren’t the one shared topics that the 2 artists depict.
One in every of Van Gogh’s most well-known inspirations — sunflowers — additionally seem in Kiefer’s works.
An enormous dried sunflower hangs the other way up in a glass cupboard, shedding its seeds on a guide constituted of lead sheets, whereas “Sol Invictus” reveals a sunflower towering over the artist, who’s mendacity in a yoga place often called the corpse pose.
The present additionally consists of a few of his sketches from his journey retracing Van Gogh’s footsteps.
The 79-year-old German artist has a protracted relationship not simply with Van Gogh, but in addition with the Stedelijk and Dutch collectors who purchased a few of his early works. The Stedelijk is displaying early items comparable to a sculpture of an aeroplane resembling a B-1 bomber that’s manufactured from lead and known as “Journey to the tip of the Evening.”
The centerpiece of the Stedelijk is the set up for which the present is called. Constructed up across the museum’s central staircase, it options paint-splattered garments on hangers and flower petals spilling down work and into piles on the ground, amongst many issues.
Kiefer mentioned that he wrote one of many traces within the Seeger track, which was later additionally sung in German by Marlene Dietrich, on the wall as a part of the set up: “Who will ever study?”
“This sentence makes the track philosophical,” he advised reporters. “, as a result of we can not perceive. We can not perceive, for instance, that right now issues occurred in (19)33 on the earth.”
Requested concerning the rise of the far-right Different for Germany social gathering that surged in final month’s German election, he mentioned: “It is horrible.”
The large central work is made up of a protracted checklist of elements together with emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, golf leaf, sediment of electrolysis, dried flowers, straw, cloth and metal.
The straw options in a lot of Kiefer’s work, giving them a posh floor that typically echoes Van Gogh’s daring brush strokes.
“He’s working like a kind of … alchemist remodeling materials into an artwork,” curator Edwin Bakker of the Van Gogh Museum advised The Related Press.
The exhibition opens March 7 and runs till June 9 on the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum.
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