Ashes of the Sun: Anselm Kiefer’s Alchemical Conversation with Van Gogh.

There are some artists who paint the visible, and others who exhume what history tries to bury. Anselm Kiefer, ever the grave-digger of European memory, belongs firmly in the latter camp. In his latest exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard, he does not merely invoke Vincent van Gogh - he enters into a slow-burning séance with him. The result is not a tribute, but a metaphysical reckoning staged in straw, ash, and smouldering gold leaf.

This isn’t Van Gogh’s Arles, though the ghost of that sun-drenched town haunts the room like perfume on scorched linen. This is Arles after the fire, after the silence, after the wheat has been harvested and the soil still smokes. Kiefer does not replicate Van Gogh’s palette - he scorches it. What was once ochre and cobalt becomes coal and bone. In Kiefer’s hands, the sunflower - Van Gogh’s trembling votive to the sun - is no longer a symbol of joy, but of yearning calcified. A relic. A witness.

The Sunflower as Oracle

Take his monumental sunflower canvases: their surfaces erupt with impasto so thick it verges on geological. These are not flowers but fossilised emotions, buried desires rising up through clay and pigment. Blake whispers from the paint’s surface; the myth of Clytie curls around each stem like smoke. Where Van Gogh chased the light, Kiefer mourns its departure.

Each sunflower droops like a monk mid-vigil, petals curled not in bloom but in resignation. Their stalks seem to reach not upwards but inwards, toward a memory buried deep in the soil. And yet, there is something unkillable in them. In their quiet defiance, they become more than flora - they become allegories of endurance. Of beauty found in burden. Of the way grief, when tended properly, can bloom.

Where ash becomes alchemy and history refuses to stay buried. Kiefer doesn’t so much exhibit as incant - step inside, if you dare to confront beauty with weight.

Gold that Glitters with Guilt

Downstairs, Kiefer's wheat fields glisten in eerie fidelity to Van Gogh’s palette - that deceptive yellow that once promised life and light. But here, gold is no longer a gift; it is a question. In Kiefer’s rendering, yellow becomes a paradox - both halo and hazard tape. And with the inclusion of gold leaf, the fields shimmer with sacred unease, like reliquaries with too much blood on their hands.

The scythe reappears throughout these works, not just as an agrarian tool but as a dialectical blade: part harvest, part holocaust. In Sichelschnitt, the "sickle cut" of Nazi invasion is braided into the wheat. Every brushstroke seems to ask: what grows in the shadow of atrocity? And can we harvest memory without reaping shame?

A Theology of Soil and Lead

If Van Gogh’s landscapes were love letters to light, Kiefer’s are scripture etched in soot. He doesn’t paint skies, he weighs them. His canvases are altars of contradiction: birth and barrenness, violence and veneration, decay and regeneration. Lead, a material so often associated with death and gravity, is here rendered sacred. In Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder, a single dried sunflower is hung upside down in a vitrine - a martyr in suspended animation, its seeds scattered like last rites atop an open leaden book. Goethe’s Faust is the ghostwriter of the scene.

This piece, a quiet centre of gravity in the exhibition, distils the alchemical core of Kiefer’s project: the transformation of elemental sorrow into spiritual inquiry. Ash, straw, charred wood - these are not props but protagonists. They speak. They accuse. They confess.

The Landscape as Liturgy

Kiefer does not offer the comfort of catharsis. He offers, instead, the terrible clarity of sedimented time. In his world, landscapes are not passive subjects but sentient palimpsests, carrying the inscriptions of myth, war, love, and loss. To walk through the exhibition is to read a theology written in the residues of history - where every petal is a prayer and every furrow in the earth a wound.

His photographs of sunflowers, spectral and silvered, feel less like documentation and more like echoes. They are apparitions that flicker at the edge of vision - memory as mirage, caught in the act of vanishing.

Beyond Homage

Make no mistake: this is not a nostalgic gesture. Kiefer does not tip his hat to Van Gogh - he raises the dead. This is a dialogue conducted across centuries, not to mimic the master, but to remind us that some wounds do not age - they deepen. And through this dialogue, Kiefer forges not a lineage, but a liturgy.

In the end, the exhibition isn’t about Van Gogh. It’s about what it means to carry history in your hands, to fold myth into matter, to insist that the act of remembrance is both sacred and unclean. In Kiefer’s world, the artist is less a painter and more a priest of the broken earth - officiating at the altar of the unresolved.

So come prepared. Come with silence. Come with questions you’ve been avoiding. You won’t leave with answers. But you may leave with ashes under your fingernails and the suspicion that beauty, in the right hands, is the most dangerous substance of all.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of White Cube.