Vincent van Gogh has had an enduring influence on Anselm Kiefer Hon RA over the artist’s nearly 60-year career. In June 2025, the Royal Academy of Arts will present work by both artists, exhibited side by side for the first time in the UK. The exhibition will bring together paintings and drawings by Van Gogh from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, with paintings, drawings and sculptures by Kiefer, including new work that has never been shown before. The presentation will reveal similarities of thought, process and subject matter shared by the two artists but also reflect noticeable differences, offering visitors a new insight into both artists’ work.

Van Gogh was Kiefer’s first artistic inspiration. Kiefer first encountered Van Gogh’s work at age 18 when he received a travel grant to follow in his footsteps, starting in the Netherlands, through to Belgium, Paris and Arles, in the south of France. During his travels, Kiefer produced drawings inspired by Van Gogh and was profoundly influenced by the rational structure and compositional clarity of Van Gogh’s landscapes. Throughout Kiefer’s career, the pioneer of Post-Impressionism has informed the subjects and techniques of Kiefer’s monumental paintings and sculptures which draw on history, mythology, literature, philosophy and science.

Highlights of the exhibition will include a selection of Kiefer’s celebrated large-scale landscapes, including Die Krähen (The Crows), 2019 (Courtesy of the Artist and White Cube) and Nevermore, 2014 (Courtesy Eschaton Foundation). These monumental works clearly encapsulate Kiefer’s admiration for compositional devices used by Van Gogh, through his adoption of high horizon lines, close-up imagery combined with deep perspectives and panoramic formats. They also reflect shared motifs of crows and wheatfields and a deep affinity towards painterly surface textures. Juxtaposed with seminal landscapes by Van Gogh, including Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet), 1890 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)) and Field of Irises near Arles, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)), the exhibition will allow visitors to consider Van Gogh’s enduring influence on Kiefer’s practice.