Anselm Kiefer: Where have all the Flowers Gone

This month marks the 80th birthday of Anselm Kiefer, one of Europe’s greatest living painters, master of grand, melancholic abstraction and an artist whose reputation – along with his canvases and the thickness of his impasto – has steadily grown over the course of his long career. An exhibition of some of the paintings and sculptures he produced in the 1970s and ’80s opened at the Ashmolean Museum in February; now the city of Amsterdam is paying tribute to Kiefer with a blockbuster show hosted jointly by the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk (7 March–9 June). At the former, works by Kiefer are hung alongside those by Van Gogh, a painter who continues to exert a great influence on the German artist. At the Stedelijk, which was one of the first museums in the world to purchase and display Kiefer’s art, works from the whole span of his career are on display, several of which have been painted in the last couple of years and are making their first public appearance here.

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Find out more from the Stedelijk’s website

Interior (1981), Anselm Kiefer. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © the artist

View of Journey to the End of the Night (1990) and, behind, Untitled (1989), by Anselm Kiefer. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. © the artist

Installation view of Where have all the Flowers Gone (2024) by Anselm Kiefer at the artist’s studio in Croissy, France. Photo: Nina Slavcheva; courtesy White Cube; © the artist

The Starry Night (2019), Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet; © the artist