Kiefer / Van Gogh – what a surprising and interesting show at the Royal Academy, London. I hadn’t realised that the German artist Anselm Kiefer was vastly inspired by the work of Vincent Van Gogh. It was fascinating to learn that, as young man, Kiefer travelled in the great artist’s footsteps, ending up in Arles, in the South of France, making sketches and paintings. He has produced great works which celebrate Vincent’s love of countryside and rural people. A small, but perfectly formed show and a good antidote to the visual excess of the Summer Exhibition which is on show in the main galleries.

Kiefer is a texture artist. It’s worth seeing this show just for the chance to get really close to the canvas and see how much has been applied to the surface. There are layers of paint, straw, seeds, lead and gold leaf. In this painting, above, Kiefer is channelling Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but he uses a wild selection of materials to celebrate that famous work.

The show occupies three rooms and the central space is dedicated to a small selection of Van Gogh pantings and drawings of the countryside and the glories of nature. And yes, all that texture is there, but it’s done solely with daubs and layers of oil paint.

In his travels through Van Gogh’s landscape Kiefer was also interested by the people he encountered. Many of them were too busy working in the field or agricultural employment to pose for him but the few portraits in the show convey a similar simplicity of drawing and charm.

On the left is my detailed photograph of a huge work in the first room which shows the vigorous way the straw and chaff and has been fixed to the canvas and the addition of all the other materials. And on the right is Kiefer’s own homage to Sunflowers made from a collage of woodcuts on canvas with acrylic and shellac. For Kiefer, just as for Van Gogh, the sunflower is the symbol of our ‘condition of being’. The sunflower is connected to the stars and by day moves its head towards the sun. In the night the petals close and towards the end of its bloom it declines, bending its head towards the earth.

What an intriguing show. It’s on at the Royal Academy, London until 25th October 205

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