Enjoyed this small survey of recent Anselm Kiefer paintings inspired by the work and travels of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) at White Cube's Mason's Yard tremendously. This body of works relates closely to the current exhibition - Kiefer/Van Gogh on display at the Royal Academy of Art, a short distance away across Piccadilly (and to be featured in a future post in these pages). These paintings of sunflowers and landscapes similar to Van Gogh's examine man's relationship to nature and the earth as well as the human condition. Kiefer summons up the traces of his past when as an 18 year old in 1963, he retraced Van Gogh's steps, travelling from the Netherlands to Belgium and Paris, ending up in Arles where Van Gogh would create some of his most iconic works. Art on display here pays homage, and shows Kiefer's shared affinities with Van Gogh as he renders in a painterly language similar motifs such as the sunflowers and golden, sun-saturated landscapes haunted with symbolic ravens, so redolent of the Dutch master. The ground floor gallery is turned into a wonderful meadow-like space in which the visitor is surrounded by Kiefer's paintings of scorched, charred and gilded sunflowers on heavily textural mauve/lilac backgrounds. It is a beautifully immersive experience. These reflective, almost melancholy sunflowers are in stark contrast to the vibrant yellows and ochres of Van Gogh's famous potted sunflowers, but provoke just as strong an emotional response in the viewer. Kiefer draws on poetry and Greek mythology referencing the tale of Clytie, a sea nymph who because of an unrequited love for and betrayal of Helios the sun god, was forcibly rooted to the earth and transformed to a Heliotrope (sunflower) and eternally forced to turn her face towards the sun. Another painting also references through Kiefer's handwritten scrawl across the top of the canvas William Blake's 1794 poem 'Ah! Sunflower'. The poem reflects on the flowers weariness and its yearning for the 'sweet golden clime' that fades daily with the setting sun. Kiefer's sunflowers become anthropomorphic, their heads drooping with the weight of expectation and hope/disillusionment as the sun fades. The exhibition closes in the small foyer space at the bottom of the stairs in the lower gallery with three gorgeous, charcoal-toned silver gelatin photographs which add a new aspect and nuance to the artists sunflower oeuvre. In contrast to these there are immense landscapes almost taking up whole walls of the lower gallery space. I admire Kiefer's fearless sense of scale and monumentality in which these landscapes enfold the viewer. The heavily gold-leafed backdrops and thickly impastoed surfaces with foliage and forboding black ravens give these pieces an almost otherworldly Elysian appearance. The scythe is an element which always seems to crop up in these landscapes, a memento-mori, serving to remind us that at death we will return to the very same land we have worked. Of course no Anselm Kiefer exhibition would be complete without an aspect of sculpture and this can be found centre stage confined in a huge glass vitrine in the lower gallery. the vitrine houses a large sculpture of a sunflower which has sprouted out of the pages of a cast lead book strewn with golden sunflower seeds. An Anselm Kiefer exhibition is never anything less than a theatrical spectacle, and this exhibition like its counterpart across at the Royal Academy of Art is compelling. I left both feeling really uplifted. Both exhibitions were the artistic shot in the arm I needed.
