Anselm Kiefer Exhibition.

Reflective WritingExhibitionsInspirationMaterials

10 Jun

Where have all the flowers gone.

While we were visiting the Netherlands at the end of May, my partner's parents got us tickets to the Anselm Kiefer exhibition, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam - and thankfully they had, as by the time we were there it had completely sold out. If the queues of people in the rain were anything to go by, I knew I was in for a memorable experience.

The exhibition was incredibly vast, spread across two separate buildings - the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk - and organised in collaboration with the Anselm Kiefer studio. It was clear how much work had gone on behind the scenes to bring it all together, with the hope that visitors would be “challenged to reflect on the questions raised by Kiefer’s work: questions of human existence, the past, present and future, and the power of art to move us” (Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2024, p.7).

The first part of the exhibition, at the Van Gogh Museum, focused on the dialogue between Van Gogh and Kiefer’s work. Kiefer has long admired Van Gogh, and seeing their pieces in the same room made it easier to trace those points of connection - the shared affinity towards sunflowers, for instance, or Kiefer’s travels across Europe with a grant, following in Van Gogh’s footsteps.

I’ve always felt a strong connection to Van Gogh’s work, ever since I was a child. I had a book about a journey through an art gallery - the main character guided you through different famous paintings, stepping into each one and telling you about the artist behind it. The two that really stuck with me were Van Gogh and Monet. I can’t remember the name of the book now, or who else was featured in it (it might still be in a box at my parents’ house), but I remember being completely in awe of those paintings - like I’d never seen anything like them before.

So to see another artist respond to Van Gogh’s work and weave that influence into their own practice was really striking - especially in Kiefer’s interpretation of The Starry Night, and in how he engaged with pieces like Wheatfield with Crows, which is so often viewed through a heavy, tragic lens because of where Van Gogh was in his life when he painted it.

This was the first time I’d seen Kiefer’s work in person, and I don’t think you can really grasp the full scale or texture of the pieces until you’re standing in front of them. These vast canvases towered over you, almost enveloping the room and pulling you in - there’s nothing else you can do but stop and look. And being very tactile, I found myself trying to get as close as possible, just to see every single texture and material he’d used. There was such energy to them, like they were still smouldering where he’d used the blowtorch. It felt like a strange juxtaposition - something fragile enough to crumble off the canvas, but also so solid and imposing it might stand there forever, unmoved.

Seeing the sheer scale and physical presence of Kiefer’s work made me reflect on the power that scale can have in drawing an audience in and demanding stillness - making people pause and bear witness. With the constant busyness of modern life - people always rushing to and fro, ruled by algorithms, and further divided - it’s hard to be heard, to go against that pace. Artists have always tried to translate the embodied experience, but the way Kiefer does it, through scale and texture and material, forces you to pay attention. These works seem to say: “Here I am - look. Confront it.”

Even though I don’t have the space or resources right now to work at that scale, I want to keep pushing towards it - going as large as I can while still holding on to the small details and movement in my work. I’m interested in how those details can carry energy too - how they might evoke something of the embodied experience, filtered through memory, belonging, and identity. Even if it’s only a fraction, that’s still something worth reaching for.