A lifelong inspiration

When the 18-year-old Anselm Kiefer won a scholarship in 1963, he decided to follow in Vincent van Gogh's footsteps through Holland, Belgium and France. He made numerous drawings and studied the compositional structures of van Gogh's landscapes in particular. In his subsequent career, which spanned over 60 years, Kiefer repeatedly found inspiration in van Gogh's work: it shaped the themes and techniques of Kiefer's monumental paintings and sculptures, which refer to history, mythology, literature, philosophy and science. This is the first time that works by both artists have been shown in parallel in an exhibition in the UK. However, the differences in the work of the two artists are also an important part of the exhibition and are highlighted just as much as their similarities. Kiefer / Van Gogh can be seen at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from June 28 to October 26.

The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, from which many works were lent. In addition to highlights such as Kiefer's monumental work Die Krähen (The Crows) (2019), in which the artist's admiration for van Gogh's compositional means and shared motifs of crows and wheat fields as well as an affinity for painterly surface textures is evident, the aforementioned drawings that Kiefer made during his scholarship and recent works that have never been shown publicly before are also on display. Kiefer, who has received the prestigious Goslarer Kaiserring and Praemium Imperiale awards, is one of the most important artists of our time. He is particularly appreciated for his complex examination of the National Socialist era, for which he was often criticized in the 1970s, as not everyone wanted him to deal with it.