In these works, created in 2019 just before the pandemic altered the world’s course, the fields and skies he renders echo the violence of the past and the uncertainty of what is yet to come. Their immense surfaces are layered with straw, ash, pigment, and industrial matter, capturing both the ruin of war and the strange beauty that persists in its wake.

Beilzeit—Wolfszeit (Axe-Age—Wolf-Age) invokes the Völuspá, the prophetic Old Norse poem that foretells the world’s destruction. In Kiefer’s hands, axes sprout roots that burrow into the earth, embodying the entanglement of violence and fertility. The painting becomes a vision of apocalypse in which tools of war take on organic form, merging death with renewal.

Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) recalls the German Army’s “sickle cut” strategy during the Battle of France in 1940. Here, two monumental sickles cross beneath a blackened sky, cutting into a golden field. The work embodies both harvest and devastation, suggesting that history repeats its cycles of reaping and ruin.

Kiefer’s landscapes are never simple depictions of terrain. They are stages on which myth, memory, and violence intertwine. The fields shimmer like gold yet remain scarred, reminding us that beauty often emerges through fracture and that the ground we walk on is layered with histories of destruction and survival.