– Elisabetta Masala –

The Time of Dialogue

Every work of art is born from dialogue, a continuous exchange between past and present, between heritage and reinvention. At the Royal Academy in London, Anselm Kiefer (Donaueschingen, 1945) meets Vincent van Gogh (Groot-Zundert, 1853) in the exhibition Kiefer | Van Gogh.

In 1963, at only eighteen years old, Kiefer retraced the steps of the Dutch painter, travelling from Paris to Arles on what he himself describes as a “journey of initiation,” intended not so much to absorb moods and emotions as to grasp the truest compositional essence of those ancient works. “Contrary to what one might expect of a teenager, I was not overly interested in the emotional aspect of Van Gogh’s work or in his unhappy life. What impressed me was the rational structure, the confident construction of his paintings, in a life that was increasingly slipping out of his control,” Kiefer recalls.

Sixty years later, this bond is renewed in an exhibition that traverses languages and visions in an ideal dialogue, bringing together Kiefer’s early drawings, large-scale canvases, and new works with Van Gogh’s landscapes and wheat fields. Both artists share a striving toward the absolute: in the starry skies and golden fields, in the very substance of paint and the light that permeates it. Yet while Van Gogh sought the infinite through colour and the vibrant pulse of nature, Kiefer questions it through the weight of history, through the memory of earth and ash. In his works, the light of sunflowers turns into scorched gold; the canvas yields to matter and to time.

This encounter between the two masters is more than a tribute: it is a way of seeing Van Gogh through the eyes of a great contemporary artist, reminding us that every creative gesture is born of an inheritance and renews it. The same approach characterises the educational programmes and exhibitions at MAN, such as Giotto | Fontana. Lo spazio d’oro, where the dialogue between eras became an opportunity to reflect on the continuity of art’s great themes: light, space, the sacred. From the gold grounds of medieval panels to Fontana’s slashed canvases, painting unfolds across the centuries as a single, unbroken quest for the infinite.