Contact High: Anselm Kiefer at 80

Ranbir Sidhu visits two recent exhibitions of Anselm Kiefer in Greece and the Netherlands.

By Ranbir SidhuDecember 17, 2025

• Art & Architecture

LAST SUMMER, I visited a small solo exhibition of recent work by the German artist Anselm Kiefer at the Gagosian gallery in the upscale Athens neighborhood of Kolonaki. On display were four medium-sized “paintings” (medium-sized for Kiefer, as the smallest was almost 13 feet wide), a “photograph,” and two “sculptures.” I use scare quotes because categorizing Kiefer’s work as one thing or another is a fool’s errand. The paintings are sculptural, the photographs are painted over, and the sculptures—each encased in a rectangular vitrine—more closely resemble an arrangement of objects. I was so taken by these pieces that I returned the following day.

I first encountered Kiefer’s work at MASS MoCA, where just over a decade ago a building was dedicated to a long-term exhibition of his art. I remember a sense of intrigue: the multiplicity of materials, the scale, the sheer physical mass of the works—along with their visceral engagement with history, myth, and horror. Though much of it left me puzzled (Why the planes that cannot possibly fly? The ships stuck to canvases, the empty attic rooms, the massive unreadable books forged from lead?), I sensed I was encountering, as in the work of another artist I admire, William Blake, a private language: a wholly personal engagement with the world.

In his lucid monograph Anselm Kiefer (2001), critic Daniel Arasse aptly calls the work a “labyrinth”—anyone who seriously encounters Kiefer’s art soon loses themselves inside of it. Kiefer, of course, has many labyrinths. They include the elaborate complexes that comprise his two major studios, one at Barjac, in the south of France, and the other at Croissy, outside Paris. The former is home to 60 buildings that sprawl across 40 hectares, filled with sculptures, constructions, paintings, excavations, tunnels, caves, and other works embedded into the landscape. Then there is the labyrinth of the work itself. As Arasse writes, “one thing leads to another, associations are reiterated and altered, an endless thread is spun from work to work, from physical objects to motifs, from one decade to another.” There is also the labyrinth of history and myth that form an almost mathematical language at the heart of the work. More than simply making work about a subject, Kiefer entangles history, myth, story, memory, and time in the physicality of the work itself. The materials—paint, ash, seeds, flowers, lead, wire, wheat, concrete, all sorts of bric-a-brac that might be lying around, even fire—conspire on the surface to undermine any hints of didacticism. What results is a sense of an ongoing dance between subject and object, between the artist and his preoccupations.

This entangled relationship became tangible for me as I stood before Kiefer’s 2023 painting Cosenza at the Gagosian. Housed in its own room, it was so new that it still gave off a heady aroma of freshly applied oils. Kiefer applies a fabulous amount of paint to each work, squeezed directly from the tube onto the surface and spread liberally. The large works can be as wide as 65 feet, and the paint is applied in seemingly endless thick layers, each occluding or mixing with the one below, the image emerging out of a ragged topography that feels at once intuitive and considered. Despite the often heady themes, Kiefer is as much an artist of the gut as he is of the head.

Cosenza is a striking canvas, all gold and blue, but the blue is deep and rich—the wine-dark color of the Mediterranean near sunset, when the water coruscates in flashes of pinprick lights—while the sky in the painting alternates between great, messy patches of gold leaf bleeding into regions of dark brown and black. A central island dominates the canvas—a mountain of rock composed largely of gold and painted in thick, dense layers of oil and acrylic, shellacked and glistening. “Kiefer’s broken surfaces seem alive even when they represent a field of death,” Simon Schama writes, “studded and crusted with every manner of material: stratified layers of paint nicked and pitted, punctured and penetrated, cracked and torn, beaten and burned, stained and bloodied, as if an army had driven through its inadequate barriers.” Such physicality can be overwhelming. Here, the mountain heaves out of the water, a thing unto itself. The impact is immediate. Walking into the room, I felt as if I was standing with another presence, an actual being—not just a painting. On the first day, I felt giddy staring at the image, as if I might fall headlong into it. It seemed to grow larger before my eyes, filling my vision, and I could sense it on my skin as if it were on fire. When I left, I was oddly filled with a bubbling happiness.

What happened when I visited on the second day continues to haunt me. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a hallucination, a contact high from the paint fumes. A woman was standing in the room, staring at the painting, like I was, from a position at the back wall, unmoving, a look of concentration on her face. We stood there for half an hour, a few feet apart, saying nothing to each other, barely moving. Occasionally, another visitor would walk into the room, take a quick look at the painting, and walk out. Otherwise, we were left alone. While the painting had seemed to grow the day before, now it was as if it contained everything, held the world inside it. I vanished into the details, the sparks of color, the rise and fall of the surface, the glint of light across it. Looking at it even for a few seconds felt like watching an hours-long epic movie. There were moments when I felt as if I had been standing in front of it for my whole life, that I would continue to stand in front of it for the rest of my life. It was beginning to feel like a mushroom trip, something I’d only ever done twice. Then the really strange thing happened: time collapsed. That’s the best way I can describe it. I fell into some kind of trance. The linear world around me disappeared. Past, present, and future melded into a single moment, or every moment became every other. I couldn’t leave, my feet rooted to the floor, and I was slowly melting away. At a certain point, I turned briefly to the woman. She was around my age, smartly dressed, but not Greek—a cultural tourist, I guessed. I could see in her eyes that she was also experiencing something out of the ordinary. We nodded to each other and the hallucination shattered. I fell back to earth and again was simply standing in a white-painted room looking at a painting of an island. My body hummed from the experience for hours, and like the day before, I felt an intense, almost explosive happiness. 

A year later, I traveled to Amsterdam to visit the dual Anselm Kiefer shows at the Van Gogh and Stedelijk museums, collectively named Where Have All the Flowers Gone. The title was plucked from the 1955 Pete Seeger folk ballad, a curiously schmaltzy choice for an artist who first made his name photographing himself performing a Nazi salute in various locations across Europe, for a series titled Occupations (1969). The unique twinned show (never before had these two museums collaborated in this way) was designed to celebrate Kiefer’s 80th birthday. Since my visit to the Athens exhibition, Donald Trump had been reelected president of the United States and, as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine were grinding inexorably on with all their bloody, sickening carnage, it was beginning to feel like Trump might accidentally plunge us all into a world war. While thoughts of my quasi-spiritual encounter with Kiefer were on my mind, the theme of war and its aftermath—central to Kiefer’s work throughout his career—was now very much at the heart of my concerns. What I wanted to know was whether something of the precariousness of the contemporary moment had found its way into his most recent works.

Born in 1945, Kiefer grew up in the ruins of postwar Germany, with all the deprivations that such a life entailed. In Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Klaus Dermutz (2019), the artist says that the place where he was born was the “wrong place,” and also that his family was the “wrong family.” There’s a sharp clarity in such declarations. Reading these interviews, one cannot help but feel awed by his endlessly curious magpie intelligence, his thrill at learning and making unique connections, and his sheer erudition, which ranges across millennia. Yet he manages to retain an almost childlike pleasure in the gritty substance of knowledge itself, happy to get his hands dirty in the muck of history. It’s no surprise that he quickly left the “wrong place” for neighboring France and spent part of his life wandering, including a year in India. An abiding sense of unbelonging haunts much of his work, where everything is destroyed and everything is lost. There are enormous, affecting landscapes, utterly devoid of people—or if there is a person, it is often Kiefer himself, lying on the ground, as though he were dead. There are ruined empty rooms and ruined empty buildings, and half-destroyed towers that seem as if they might topple with the slightest push. His work feels like an epic ode to an already-lost world, and perhaps it is in this sense that his work seems most prescient and also moving.

I was thinking about this question of prescience as I was rereading Mark Mazower’s revisionist history, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (the title’s ironic nod to Europe’s historically derogatory view of its southern neighbor being entirely intentional). Published in 1998, at the end of a decade of Western liberal triumphalism (exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s deeply misguided but influential 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, a paean to the coming worldwide steady-state democracy), Dark Continent argued that we had looked at Europe’s 20th century through a fundamentally flawed lens. The challenge to democracy there since World War II had come less from communism than from homegrown strains of fascism and authoritarianism, along with deep-seated racial and ethnic hatreds and their attendant populisms, ever bubbling below the surface. This was hardly a welcome message in the immediate years following the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, with those blissed-out promises of peace dividends and soul-searching about NATO’s imminent obsolescence. Mazower strikes me as soulmate to the young Kiefer, who wandered Europe’s cities in the late 1960s and early ’70s, performing his Nazi salute in the face of a continent that just wanted to forget, to move on. Both figures were rubbing people’s faces in exactly what they didn’t want to see. From the vantage point of 2025, Mazower reads like a prophet, one we should have listened to much more closely a few decades ago.

And so does Kiefer. Or at least he did. I can’t fault the double show’s outsize ambition. It was genuinely staggering, and much of the work left one breathless. At the Van Gogh, where the show began, you entered to several massive canvases, each drawing a line from Vincent van Gogh to Kiefer. Nevermore (2014) stuns with its thick layers of emerald cut through with golden wheat stalks, while above, black splotches, sort-of wings attached to sort-of legs, hover ominously. In a variation on the theme from 2024, created for this exhibition, the connection to Van Gogh’s 1890 Wheatfield with Crows is made explicit. The palette is now burnt straw and earth tones while the crows virtually vanish into the sky’s golden brilliance. The foreboding is gone, the birds swallowed whole by the sun’s power. But the evocation of Van Gogh feels too easy for an artist of Kiefer’s far-reaching imaginative powers, almost a cop-out.

From the age of 18, when Kiefer won a fellowship to go on a sketching tour following in the footsteps of Van Gogh, his work has been deeply entwined with the Dutch master’s. Think of the grand empty fields, the glorious sunflowers, and perhaps above all, the night skies, shimmering and transcendent, a theme Kiefer has returned to again and again. The centerpiece at the Van Gogh Museum was Kiefer’s recreation of 1889’s The Starry Night, that inevitable squatter on countless dorm room walls. Leaving behind the moody blues and blacks of Van Gogh’s masterpiece, Kiefer gives us a 30-foot-wide vision in emerald, gold, and monstrously thick sinews of burnt straw, the latter twisting themselves into the giddy celestial cartwheels of the original. The town in the original is gone: this is just the sky, and we have entered the heavens. But again, for all its jaw-dropping beauty, the gesture seemed obvious, almost forced.

At the adjoining Stedelijk, we encountered a beguiling 1986 work, The Women of the Revolution, where great sheets of lead become a wall for glass frames affixed slightly askew. Each frame depicts a figure, from the mythical Brünhilde to the very real Madame de Staël, as a single dried flower. A lone, misshapen trowel hangs from a wire. While initially confounding, the play of textures was mesmerizing: shifting gray tones undulate on the surface as the delicacy of the flowers balances against the rough-hewn metal. In the next room, visitors confronted the large and unsettling painting Axe-Age—Wolf-Age (2019), which seems torn from the pages of a nightmare by the novelist China Miéville. A thunderous blue-black sky looms over a golden-yellow field, rutted with deep red or dark brown furrows, while across it, from left to right, marches a procession of figures, their bodies formed from tree branches topped with axe-heads, each painted a striking gold. Violence merges with myth, history, and landscape, and in both these works we meet Kiefer the alchemist, as surfaces become sites for magical transformation.

Included at the Van Gogh Museum exhibition is the almost 16-foot-tall Sol Invictus (1995), which shows a naked Kiefer lying prone at the bottom in the “Savasana,” or corpse, yoga pose. Towering over him, possibly growing out of him, a single, visually muted sunflower showers him with black seeds. It’s an image of death and rebirth, of deep cycles of time, and for such an avowed cynic as Kiefer, a slyly hopeful work. Such transformations lie at the heart of many of his obsessions. Take, for example, the apocalyptic Sickle Cut (2019), where enormous crossed sickles hover like demons over a turbulent, golden field while the horizon burns from some faraway horror. Within the devastation, there’s the possibility of change. Once those sickles cut the wheat, the field will be renewed; once winter ends, spring will bring life.

It was with a sense of disappointment, therefore, that I came upon the “showstopper,” the truly imposing central and titular work, Where Have All the Flowers Gone (2024). Enveloping on all four sides the entire upper landing of the Stedelijk’s grand marble staircase, five canvases formed a surrounding frieze, plunging the viewer into a world of gold leaf rising 23 feet into the air. Figures of women doing manual work in India are juxtaposed against writhing 19th-century psychiatric patients, all translated into monumental beings. Below, on a darkened, burnt canvas, the weathered and damaged uniforms of men and children. As the museum catalog explains, it’s an image of transience, of the absurdity of life, and of constant change. In that grand, 19th-century hall, it felt closer to a kind of kitschy bling that was muddled and never quite resolved. Like Kiefer’s Starry Night, this was a pastiche, but here Kiefer was mimicking himself. That’s not to deny the beauty of the work, nor the impact: moving closer, finely examining the destroyed clothes, one should find the intricate play of paint and fabric and tear genuinely moving. But somehow it didn’t fit; the setting was wrong. What power it all might have was siphoned off by the milling crowds amid the ornate Neo-Renaissance interior—too upmarket, too safe.

“Paintings need their own buildings to work,” Kiefer told Klaus Dermutz. “They require their own site of action. Only from this can they have an effect in the world.” This seems central to Kiefer’s method, where the work exists almost entirely in relation to its context. In his book-length essay Limbo (2018), Dan Fox asks, “When does a work of art happen?” For me, clearly, it happened when I stood in front of Cosenza. At the Stedelijk, there was no possibility of entering into any kind of relationship with such mammoth works. We were all dwarfed, the works included. To see the largest panels fully, you had to stand on the opposite balcony, so you found yourself looking at the other visitors who were looking at you. Perhaps Kiefer intended this, that the interaction was not solely between the individual and the work but also with the rush of humanity passing through, the great, transient daily masses. In a video accompanying the exhibition, presented on a theater-sized screen, a dancer moves through the work. Shot before it was transferred to the Stedelijk, in Kiefer’s expansive studio with its concrete, messy floor and bric-a-brac lying around, the work looks much more at home. Perhaps that is where, in Dan Fox’s words, it will, or did, happen.

Those alchemical transformations at the heart of Kiefer’s work originate in a refusal to turn away from horror while looking simultaneously into the depths of time and myth. This ability is a transformative gift. While Mazower investigated the unacknowledged underbelly of modern European history, Kiefer took a crowbar to German self-image at the mythic level, penetrating parts of the soul no one wanted, or dared, to look at. The (admittedly glorious) golden images on the landing at the Stedelijk, or the Starry Night at the Van Gogh, seemed to offer no hidden insights, no dark corners that needed to be brought into the light. They are crowd-pleasers, drenched in color, while any shadows feel forced. Such sumptuous beauty offers its own kind of contact high. The gold, the monumentality, the sense of being overawed, it all speaks to the kid in us. An artist of Kiefer’s magnitude at 80, perhaps at any age, deserves the freedom to throw off the weight of their history. After all, transformation is at the heart of his work. And so is childlike wonder, which Kiefer has always retained despite staring into great ugliness. In his essay “Tándaradéi,” Karl Ove Knausgaard noted a recent shift, a “radical turn towards the light, such an explosion of colour and desire” in Kiefer’s recent watercolors. Indeed, those watercolors are limpid and gorgeous, so sensually explosive that you want to dive in and swim around inside them. We all need beauty in our lives, and I appreciate Kiefer’s turn toward it. Still, I miss the alchemist. Here we just have the gold. The harsher truths of the lead are cast aside.

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Featured image: Anselm Keifer, Cosenza, 2023. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, and shellac on canvas, 110 1/4 x 149 5/8 inches (280 x 380 cm).