Anselm Kiefer’s Les Fleurs du mal (1994–2012) borrows its title from Baudelaire’s landmark collection, and like Baudelaire’s poems, these works dwell in the paradox of beauty and decay. The sunflower, long central to Kiefer’s practice, becomes both a personal emblem and a cosmic sign. It is a flower that turns its face to the sun, yet here it appears in states of shadow, inversion, and dissolution, caught between life and its afterimage.

In this series, Kiefer creates images that blur the boundary between photography and painting. Positive, negative, and solarized impressions of sunflowers are layered with splashes of emulsion and tint, evoking not static representation but transformation in motion. The stalks bend, the leaves arc, the seed heads darken, yet in their decline a strange vitality persists.

Kiefer places the sunflower within a lineage that includes Van Gogh’s radiant fields and Nolde’s spectral blossoms, yet his vision is darker, more entangled with history. The flowers stand as monuments to metamorphosis, at once earthly and cosmic. They remind us that renewal is born of rupture, that the cycle of light and shadow is inseparable, and that even in decline there is energy, a turning toward the infinite.