In these works, created in 2019 just before the pandemic altered the world's course, the fields and skies he renders carry the violence of the past and seem to brace for what's still coming. Their immense surfaces are layered with straw, ash, pigment, and industrial matter: ruin and a strange beauty that persists in its wake, sitting side by side.

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 growth.

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 holds harvest and devastation in the same gesture, suggesting history repeats its cycles of reaping and ruin.

Kiefer's landscapes are never simple depictions of terrain. They're stages where myth, memory, and violence intertwine. The fields shimmer like gold yet stay scarred: beauty emerging through fracture, the ground beneath us layered with everything it has survived.