Two Amsterdam museums unite in major Anselm Kiefer exhibition
In an unprecedented collaboration, the Stedelijk Museum and the Museum Van Gogh are teaming up to host a comprehensive exhibition on Anselm Kiefer. Opening in 2025, the show will be presented as a diptych across both Amsterdam institutions, with each part tracing key aspects of the German artist’s oeuvre and creative influences across his past and new works.
The exhibition, “Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” is headlined by a new spatial work that the artist will unveil at the Stedelijk. Still in the process of being completed by Kiefer, the 24-meter-long installation is set to occupy the space around the venue’s historic staircase. Its title, and that of the exhibition, is borrowed from Pete Seeger’s seminal 1955 folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” later made famous by Marlene Dietrich, and points to flowers—specifically, the “Sunflowers” of Van Gogh - which inspired the artist's most recent landscapes.
In the Stedelijk exhibition, “Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” as well as another new installation, will join Kiefer’s previous works emerging from the museum’s collection. The Stedelijk has a long relationship with the artist, marked by his solo exhibition in 1986 and the acquisition of paintings by him, including “Innenraum” (1981) and “Märkischer Sand” (1982). This latest exhibition will display all of Kiefer’s works that the museum holds, offering a rare survey of the artist’s decades-long career.
“It will be truly remarkable to see these [new] installations soon, in the midst of several iconic works from the 1980s,” Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk, said in a statement. “In this way, Kiefer looks to the past and to the future.”
Throughout Kiefer's long career, the poet Paul Celan and German Romanticism have been guides, as has Vincent Van Gogh. In his early years, the artist traced the Dutch painter’s journey from the Netherlands to Arles, France, where 17-year-old Kiefer spent three weeks on a farm creating a set of drawings. Speaking to an audience at Tate Britain in 2019, he explained that he was not drawn to the emotional content of Kiefer’s work. Van Gogh, but rather for its “professional clarity”.
“What really struck me at that time was the rational structure, the confident construction of his paintings – in a life that was increasingly slipping out of his control,” he said.
The exhibition at the Museum Van Gogh reveals the Impressionist's profound influence on Kiefer. It will bring together the Dutchman's major masterpieces with the German artist's new paintings, with the most notable combinations highlighting how sunflowers served as motifs in Kiefer's works. Van Gogh and Kiefer - as in the former's “La Berceuse” (1889) and the latter's “Tournesols” (1996).
“Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind” will be on display at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and at the Van Gogh Museum, Museumplein 6, Amsterdam, Netherlands, from 7 March to 9 June 2025.
Source: Artnet News