Sunflowers are the first thing to grab you in this dual show, but they are German artist Anselm Kiefer’s sunflowers, not Vincent van Gogh’s. Instead of bright explosions of life, these are dead and scorched, like black holes, and beneath them lies a man, or rather a rotting corpse. On the surface (and there is a lot on the surfaces of Kiefer’s paintings; wheat, gold leaf, lead, an entire scythe) this looks like a slightly bleak situation. Yet the glow of the body in the breaking dawn suggests renewal, and as we come to see in this show, for all the violence and rage in Kiefer’s work, he is a van Gogh man, with a lust for life in the face of death.
In fact Kiefer, born 55 years after van Gogh’s death in the burning aftermath of the Second World War, had a crucial formative period as an 18-year-old when he headed out on Van Gogh’s trail through France, the Netherlands and Belgium. He called it an “initiation journey” and his work on display here shows the grand impact of Van Gogh. And Kiefer’s is epic, apocalyptic work, Van Gogh-style landscapes with crows and desolation, but blown up to wall-size and plastered with chunky, unconventional materials that explode from the canvases as if he’s so intensely taken by Van Gogh’s intensity that he’s not just intensely recreating his work but trying to get inside it.
