Kiefer exhibition, a collaboration between Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Van Gogh Museum

For the first time in their history, the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam were joining forces to stage a major exhibition of one of the most important artists of our time: Anselm Kiefer. The exhibition was on show from 7 March until 9 June 2025.

This diptych exhibition placed Kiefer centre stage, highlighting the artist’s special connection with the work of Vincent van Gogh and showing all of Kiefer’s best-loved works from the Stedelijk collection.

Both venues also presented new, previously unexhibited work by the artist, including the immense and breathtaking title work of the exhibition: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind. This artwork covered the entire circumference of the historic staircase of the Stedelijk.

Anselm Kiefer got center stage in the two museums that are strongly linked to his artistic development.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the 1955 protest song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” by American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger, which became famous when Marlene Dietrich performed it in 1962. Kiefer’s expansive new installation for the Stedelijk Museum Sag mir wo die Blumen sind combines paint, clay, uniforms, dried rose petals, and gold, symbolising the cycle of life and death with the human condition and fate of mankind playing a central motif. The flowers of the title are also a reference to the Sunflowers (1889) by Vincent van Gogh and to recent landscapes by Kiefer, which could be seen for the first time in the exhibition

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945, Donaueschingen, Germany) was born in the closing months of World War II. In the late 1960s, Kiefer was one of the first German artists to address the country’s fraught history in monumental, acerbic works for which he sustained intense criticism in his homeland.

Later, Kiefer would be hailed for breaking the silence surrounding Germany’s past. His work reflects on themes such as history, mythology, philosophy, literature, alchemy, and landscape. In the Netherlands, his work first gained recognition among collectors and museums like the Stedelijk.