ANSELM KIEFER

Photography is an underrecognized aspect of Kiefer’s art that has played a central role in hispractice from the 1960s through the present. Gagosian’s exhibition complements Anselm Kiefer: Laphotographie au commencement (Anselm Kiefer: Photography at the Beginning), organized by the LilleMétropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut (LaM). The first retrospective tofocus on the artist’s relationship with photography, LaM’s exhibition features over a hundred worksfrom throughout his career and will be on view October 6, 2023–March 3, 2024.

For Robert Fludd features steel-framed, black-and-white photographs of sunflowers by Kiefer from hisseries Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1994–2012), which was titled after Charles Baudelaire’sfamed collection of Symbolist poetry. Following artists including Emil Nolde and especially Vincentvan Gogh, Kiefer has been drawn repeatedly to the sunflower as a symbol of metamorphosis andregeneration. The exhibition’s dedication to the early modern cosmologist Robert Fludd refers to theconnections that Fludd drew between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, and his belief that everyplant on earth has a corresponding star in the sky.

The dynamic Les Fleurs du Mal works pair positive, negative, and solarized images of the flowers’arcing stalks, vigorous leaves, and expansive heads with abstract splatters of photographic emulsionand tinting that echo their imposing vitality and suggest constant cosmic transformation. Jericho(2010–15), a photograph of one of Kiefer’s series of monumental Die Himmelspaläste (2003–18)sculptures at La Ribaute, his former studio complex in Barjac, France—now part of his foundation,Eschaton—reinforces the dual themes of growth and destruction.