Gagosian will present Anselm Kiefer: Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still, a new exhibition of paintings opening 15th May at its West 24th Street gallery in New York City. The show brings together a new body of work that continues Anselm Kiefer’s long-running engagement with mythology, landscape and the symbolic role of feminine archetypes.
Working across monumental scale and dense materiality, Kiefer’s new paintings draw on sources including Rainer Maria Rilke, Caspar David Friedrich and figures from classical mythology, weaving literary, historical and allegorical references into richly layered surfaces. Executed using oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf and electrolysis sediment, the works foreground transformation — both physical and symbolic — as a central theme.
The electrolysis material, a verdigris green formed through chemical reaction, reflects Kiefer’s enduring interest in alchemy, where matter is continuously altered through process. Across the exhibition, this approach becomes both a visual and conceptual framework, linking the elemental to the mythological.
In Für R.M.R. wirf mir die Ohren zu: ich kann dich hören (2023–25), a human face emerges from the rough surface of a boulder, partially concealed within the painting’s dense textures. Inscribed with a verse from Rilke’s The Book of Hours, the work evokes a search for spiritual understanding, where voice and presence persist beyond physical boundaries.
Another key work, Naturwirklichkeit und Kunstwahrheit (2005–25), brings together landscape and artistic gesture through the image of a painter’s palette suspended over a field of bare, branching forms. Both a literal and symbolic device, the palette suggests the potential of art itself — hovering between representation and transformation — while referencing the Romantic tradition of Friedrich, where landscape becomes a site of metaphysical reflection.
At the core of the exhibition is a series of paintings depicting female figures embedded within dense, shifting environments. Drawing on mythological nymphs such as Claea, Electra and Neaera, Kiefer connects the human body to landscape as a site of allegory and transformation. Elsewhere, figures undergo metamorphosis into natural forms — trees, flowers and organic matter — continuing narratives rooted in classical mythology.
In Tyche (2024), the goddess of fortune appears from behind, her form wrapped in flowing fabric and suspended above a ring of megalithic stones. As with much of Kiefer’s work, the image sits between temporal registers — ancient, modern and mythic — collapsing distinctions between history, memory and imagination.
The exhibition extends themes developed in recent major presentations, including Becoming the Sea at the Saint Louis Art Museum and Le Alchimiste at Palazzo Reale. Both exhibitions foreground Kiefer’s sustained interest in landscape, material transformation and the role of women within historical and symbolic narratives.
Here, those concerns converge in a new body of work that continues to expand his visual language — one where surface, substance and story remain inseparable. Through accumulation, erosion and transformation, Kiefer’s paintings operate as both images and objects, holding within them the tension between permanence and change.
ANSELM KIEFER, Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still, May 15th–June 27th, 2026, Gagosian
West 24th Street
