Kiefer / Van Gogh
Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
28 June – 26 October 2025
I saw this exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London over the summer and, although I hadn’t found time to write about it until now, I found it fascinating to see the work of both artists side by side. The show highlights surprising similarities in thought, process, and subject matter, even though their art looks very different at first glance.
Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch Post-Impressionist, created more than 2,000 works in just a decade. His bold colours and expressive brushwork laid the groundwork for Expressionism and Fauvism. Anselm Kiefer, born in Germany in 1945, works on a monumental scale, using oil and acrylic but also unconventional materials such as lead, straw, ash, and fire. Where Van Gogh poured his inner life onto small canvases, Kiefer confronts external history and trauma through vast, sometimes scorched surfaces.
Kiefer’s paintings
The connection between them is not accidental. In 1890 Van Gogh painted his last works; seventy-two years later, Kiefer retraced Van Gogh’s path through the Netherlands, Belgium, Paris, and Arles. Van Gogh was his first great inspiration, and that influence has echoed through Kiefer’s 60-year career. Both artists return to the same motifs—wheatfields, crows, sunflowers—symbols of life, death, and renewal. Yet their treatment differs: Van Gogh’s yellows radiate fleeting light and joy, while Kiefer’s appear heavy, muted, stripped of warmth.
Texture binds them as well. Van Gogh’s brushwork is alive with movement, while Kiefer builds thick, layered surfaces—sometimes even burning them—to create a sense of desolation. Composition also links them: high horizons, deep perspectives, panoramic formats. Yet Van Gogh’s landscapes feel intimate, almost fragile, while Kiefer’s dominate with scale and weight.
Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings
Both were deeply inspired by literature and poetry. Van Gogh often expressed his thoughts in letters, while Kiefer integrates actual poems into his works, allowing the written word to deepen their meaning. In both cases, words and images merge into something more powerful.
The exhibition combines paintings and drawings by Van Gogh with early sketches by Kiefer, alongside canvases he painted in 2019, when reflecting on his artistic forebear. The display invites you to gain new insights into Van Gogh’s paintings by seeing them through Kiefer’s eyes. Kiefer himself was not especially interested in the emotional aspect of Van Gogh’s work; instead, he remarked: “…what impressed me was the rational structure, the confident construction of his paintings, in a life that was increasingly slipping out of his control.”
Van Gogh’s paintings
The exhibition offers a unique perspective on how both artists build their work, from composition to their shared inspiration in literature and poetry. Yet, when it comes to the darkness you sense in their art, it carries very different weights. In Van Gogh, it feels internal, born of his own turmoil and instability. In Kiefer, it seems external, shaped by the trauma of growing up in post-war Germany. Kiefer believes a landscape stands as a silent witness of human history, while for Van Gogh it was a conduit to express intense feelings and emotions.
Personally, I was more drawn to the intimacy of Van Gogh’s smaller canvases, though some of Kiefer’s monumental works, accompanied by poetry, were also powerful and compelling.
If you’re in London, I’d recommend visiting the exhibition and judging for yourself. It’s open until 26 October.
Tickets: £17 / concessions available.
Leave a Reply