Sunflowers are the first thing to grab you in this dual show, but they are German artist Anselm Kiefer’s sunflowers, not Vincent van Gogh’s. Instead of bright explosions of life, these are dead and scorched, like black holes, and beneath them lies a man, or rather a rotting corpse. On the surface (and there is a lot on the surfaces of Kiefer’s paintings; wheat, gold leaf, lead, an entire scythe) this looks like a slightly bleak situation. Yet the glow of the body in the breaking dawn suggests renewal, and as we come to see in this show, for all the violence and rage in Kiefer’s work, he is a van Gogh man, with a lust for life in the face of death.
