Anselm Kiefer’s new set up appears to envelop the grand staircase of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Work attain from ground to ceiling in colours of oxidized copper and gold leaf. Military uniforms stiffened with splattered paint grasp at eye stage. Dried flower petals tumble down the canvases onto the ground. A self-portrait of Kiefer as a younger man lies on the base of 1 panel, with a tree rising out of his chest.
This set up is the title work of Kiefer’s monumental solo exhibition, which includes about 25 work, 13 drawings and three movies by Kiefer, from 1973 to the current, along with eight van Gogh works. “Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” or “The place Have All of the Flowers Gone?,” sprawls throughout two of Amsterdam’s largest fashionable artwork museums, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk.
The present, which opens on Friday — the day earlier than Kiefer’s eightieth birthday — and runs via June 9, is the results of bold collaboration between the adjoining establishments within the coronary heart of the town. Mounting the exhibit at two museums made sense on a sheer bodily stage, too, due to the scale of Kiefer’s imaginative and prescient: Practically each work takes up a wall or a room.
What hyperlinks the 2 components of this “diptych,” because the curator Edwin Becker calls the twin exhibition, is Kiefer’s antiwar sentiment, which is expressed in delicate and overt methods.
The title and the brand new piece on the middle of the Stedelijk check with the 1955 protest anthem “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” a people track by Pete Seeger (though Kiefer makes use of the lyrics from the German model popularized by Marlene Dietrich within the early Sixties).
