Viewing Kiefer / Van Gogh at Royal Academy of Arts

Two titans of painting go head to head in this thrilling exhibition across the Royal Academy’s Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler galleries: Vincent Van Gogh and Anselm Kiefer. Van Gogh, the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose final works were completed in the year of his death aged 37 in 1890, has been an important, constant influence and referenced for Kiefer, the revered German painter and sculptor known for his monumental works.

That enduring influence comes to the fore in this exhibition that returns Kiefer to the beginning of his career, when aged 18 he received a grant to retrace Van Gogh’s journey from the his birthplace, the village of Zundert, in the Netherlands to Antwerp, Paris and finally Arles. For the next sixty years, Kiefer has continued to be informed by Van Gogh’s techniques, methods and subjects.

Presented side by side are new, never-seen-before works by Kiefer, 80, who pushed the tactile brushwork of Van Gogh to new heights and evocative extremes using thick impasto and raw, expressive materials like glass, straw, lead and dried flora and fauna – one five-metre work included here adds sunflower seeds in a direct homage to Van Gogh. This show was first presented, in a slightly different iteration, in Amsterdam at the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum earlier this year.