Kiefer/Van Gogh

Aged eighteen, Anselm Kiefer embarked on a journey retracing Van Gogh’s itinerary as an artist, from the Netherlands to Provence. The Royal Academy of Art is currently exhibiting works by Kiefer and Van Gogh alongside each other. To coincide with the exhibition, we are showing Sophie Fiennes’s Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), a mesmerising exploration of Kiefer’s La Ribaute, a 40-hectare installation work in Barjac, Occitanie, alongside Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1991), an impressionistic film focused on the artists’ last few months. These two films form a poignant diptych on the relationship between light, environment, texture and emotion in modern art.