The Stedelijk Museum’s giant staircase is grand—it virtually instantly lends the museum a way of splendor. However nowadays, that staircase results in one thing unsettling: at its summit, guests face a towering set of panels layered with soil, classic uniforms, and dried flowers.
These dirtied surfaces rise excessive above viewers’ heads, giving solution to expanses lined in gold leaf and copper paint which have additionally been marked up and tarnished. There are additionally German phrases which were delicately etched by hand: “Inform me the place the flowers are/The place have they gone,” they learn when translated into English. They allude to related lyrics from a 1955 antiwar music by Pete Seeger.
This placing show marks the results of two years of collaboration between the Stedelijk and its neighboring Van Gogh Museum, the place works by the German artist Anslem Kiefer— each latest and decades-old—are on view. Over the course of his profession, Kiefer, who simply turned 80, has drawn on ugly political pasts and dug into cultural taboos in ways in which have at some moments polarized viewers.
The Van Gogh Museum present, specifically, is the place new sides of Kiefer emerge. Right here, Kiefer’s artwork is positioned alongside works by van Gogh, who painted scenes by a much more private lens. On this present, the painter takes up far much less house, receding into the background and letting Kiefer take up a lot of the viewers’s view.
Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum, mentioned she placed on the present to enliven the establishment’s programming. When she assumed her publish in 2020, she realized that locals had grown tired of the museum. “We realized they had been beginning to see it as a mausoleum,” Gordenker informed ARTnews. Satirically, it took Kiefer, an artist obsessive about demise and the ghosts of the previous, to deliver this museum again to life.
The rationale for pairing them, Gordenker mentioned, was not for aesthetic causes. As an alternative, it was to indicate how Kiefer’s fixation on van Gogh’s trajectory influenced him throughout his adolescence—and to make the argument that the lifeless painter nonetheless lives on within the minds of artists at present. (Between the ages of 13 and 18, Keifer traveled throughout Europe as van Gogh did, touchdown within the French city of Arles, the place van Gogh was institutionalized.)
It’s not the primary present of up to date artwork on the Van Gogh Museum. Final February, the establishment staged a present about Matthew Wong, a Canadian artist who painted landscapes with clear references to van Gogh earlier than his demise by suicide in 2019. On paper, Kiefer is a much less apparent pairing for van Gogh, however the present makes a powerful case for why the 2 belong collectively.
Take Sol Invictus (1995), an enormous canvas on view on the Van Gogh Museum, through which a 15-foot-tall black sunflower rains down seeds on a comatose physique. Van Gogh made what often is the most well-known photos of sunflowers ever produced. The museum seems to place Kiefer as his heir.
Kiefer’s exhibits have a couple of subtly menacing moments, because of the way in which he depicts the lifeless. His new fee for the Stedelijk, a monumental portray layered with steel, clothes, and lifeless flowers, and positioned underneath direct daylight, feels a bit like a memorial, or wreckage ensuing from political violence.
He recently told the New York Instances that whereas the most recent works don’t overtly seek advice from the political climates of the US and Germany—the nations the place he has labored and lived—present threats had been inevitably on his thoughts whereas making the piece.
Gordenker, in the meantime, famous that the Kiefer exhibits come amid an increase in nationalism, each within the Netherlands and elsewhere. After some claimed that Dutch universities had change into too worldwide, the nation’s right-wing authorities slashed budgets for larger schooling earlier this month. In the meantime, the autumn marked the first time a far-right celebration received a German state election within the nation since World Battle II. Later, that celebration gained the endorsement of some US politicians.
Kiefer has lengthy made work about fascism, however some critics have argued that his work isn’t precisely antifascist. Beginning within the late Sixties, simply as he was gaining a world following, Kiefer started resurrecting Nazi symbols and gestures. In a single significantly controversial set of images, he even did the Sieg Heil salute, scary a scandal. Later work made through the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s additionally revisit imagery associated to the Nazi period. Many of those works are sprawling landscapes that some critics have mentioned are associated to the “blood and soil” philosophy of the Third Reich.
His new floor-to-ceiling items on the Stedelijk are much less direct. They don’t explicitly say what they imply, leaving viewers to query what precisely Kiefer is attempting to speak, or whether or not he’s left audiences, particularly the youthful ones that encompass the museum’s campus, to tug out warning indicators about historical past’s faults on their very own phrases. The artist appears to be attempting to maintain current what we’d quite maintain buried, particularly throughout a time when struggle and the ghosts of the previous stay on the forefront of everybody’s thoughts. Right here, the lifeless go unnamed. As an alternative, they’re simply evoked by stiffened uniforms that take the form of absent our bodies.
