As part of his highly anticipated upcoming exhibition in 2025 spread between Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, Anselm Kiefer will be debuting a 78-foot-long painting. This week, the artist has revealed a preview of the monumental work.
The exhibition “Sag mir wo die Blumen sind” will be the first time in history that the Van Gogh Museum, which opened its doors to the public in 1973, and the Stedelijk Museum, a central point of Dutch culture since 1895, collaborate on an exhibition.
Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is also the title of Kiefer’s new 78-foot-long painting, which will fill the space around the Stedelijk Museum’s staircase. The painting has been created from emulsion, oil, and acrylic paint in addition to straw, steel, charcoal, dried flowers, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis.
Ahead of the exhibition, the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk have shared a preview photograph of the work before its installation. Kiefer is also creating a second site-specific spatial installation called Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder (“Rising, rising, sinking down”) made from lead and photographs.
Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk, said the installation at the institution, including the 78-foot-work, “will be an immersive experience.”
Kiefer is known for working at a grand scale. One of his largest paintings is housed in an airplane hangar at Kiefer’s expansive art complex, La Ribaute, in Barjac, France. The 30-foot-high painting of a nude man under a starry sky was completed for the Louvre in 2007. His exhibition in 2022 at the Doge Palace in Venice covered the opulent halls in his monumental canvases.
There will be 25 works by Kiefer on display at the Van Gogh Museum, which will be contextualized with seven paintings by Van Gogh, including Wheatfield with Crows (1890). Kiefer’s work will include 13 early drawings held in the Stedelijk’s collection as well as new paintings making their exhibition debut and films directed by the artist.
The Stedelijk acquired two of the artist’s works in the early 1980s—Innenraum (1981) and Märkischer Sand (1982)—and held a solo exhibition for Kiefer in 1986, marking a serious ramping up of the artist’s profile on the international museum circuit. “It will be truly remarkable to see these installations amid several of his iconic works from the 1980s. In this way, Kiefer looks back at the past and towards the future,” said Wolfs.”
The exhibition, the title of which means “tell me where the flowers are” references Van Gogh’s famous floral still lifes like Sunflowers (1889) and makes clear the “enduring influence” of the Dutch Post-Impressionist on Kiefer. In 1963, Kiefer embarked on a pilgrimage following Van Gogh’s journey from the Netherlands to Belgium and France, which Van Gogh had undertaken in the 1880s. The director of the Van Gogh Museum, Emilie Gordenker, said “Kiefer has been engaged with Van Gogh’s work from his early years. Sometimes the inspiration is almost literal, as in the use of sunflowers and the composition of his landscapes. Kiefer’s recent work — displayed here for the first time – shows how Van Gogh continues to make his mark on his work today.”
The show title is also a reference to the 1955 protest song “Where have all the flowers gone” by American folk singer Pete Seeger, made famous by Marlene Dietrich in 1962. Flower petals are a repeated motif throughout the exhibition, said to be “symbolizing the cycle of life and death with the human condition and fate of mankind” in the show’s press release.
A subsequent collaboration called “Kiefer / Van Gogh” will travel to London’s Royal Academy of Arts in June 2025.
