Kiefer and Van Gogh

At first glance, Kiefer's monumental works of art may not appear to have much in common with the smaller canvases of Van Gogh.

While the latter artist worked in the traditional media of oil paint and ink, the former uses conventional materials - such as oil and acrylic paints, watercolour and photography - combined with more unusual elements such as straw, seeds, lead and gold leaf. In some of his paintings, Kiefer scorches their surface with fire, evoking a sense of destruction and desolation. Despite these differences of media, the two artists share an affinity for painterly surface textures.

Kiefer's and Van Gogh's works are related through their use of recurring motifs from nature such as earth, fields of wheat, sunflowers and crows, all alluding to the cycle of life. Van Gogh's love for and repeated use of yellow is also mirrored in the work of Kiefer, who sees the Dutch artist's recurrent golden skies and fields as resembling the gilding of religious icons. The influence of Van Gogh on Kiefer can also be seen in relation to the use of compositional devices characterised by elements depicted at close range combined with deep perspectives, high horizon lines and panoramic formats.

Kiefer, like Van Gogh, is deeply influenced by literature and poetry.

Van Gogh read widely, once remarking in a letter to his brother Theo: 'books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me'.

Novels he read and sometimes even included in his works often add a further layer of meaning to his paintings and drawings. Kiefer's works frequently relate to mythology or philosophical concepts. He also uses the written word to enhance the meanings of his paintings, sometimes acting as a foil to interrogate their meaning.

In Arles in the summer of 1963, at the end of his journey in the footsteps of Van Gogh, Kiefer set out to find the landscapes and inhabitants of this southern French town which Van Gogh depicted in his characteristically expressive style. This room contains a selection of the drawings that Kiefer made there, joined by a group of Van Gogh's own works on paper.

More than 60 years later, Kiefer still finds Van Gogh's works arresting.

Dating from the last three years of the Dutch artist's life and executed in his mature style, the paintings in this room have been selected to speak to Kiefer's sensibility. He sees the works, which depict Arles and Saint-Rémy in the south of France and Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, as rich with meaning as well as fading memories. The theme of memory is central to Kiefer's practice as a German artist born a month after the end of the Second World War and growing up in a country he felt attempted to avoid confronting its past.

While we know that Van Gogh painted in front of the landscape, what is shown is no more than a starting point. He re-invests landscape with its secret. He builds a world, his world, but it is a struggle between this world and the self-secluding earth. Every energetic brushstroke is an attempt to capture it; he tries to support himself on it - he is holding onto a straw. He tries to rebuild it with these forcefully applied brushstrokes. And yet: what a failure; earth defies him. So, what does he depict? Not the wheatfield, not the romantic memory of a specific summer's day. The painting is almost abstract. What remains is the memory of something specific that has almost completely disappeared.