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, works here as a personal emblem and something closer to a cosmic sign. It's a flower that turns its face to the sun, yet here it appears in shadow, inverted, dissolving, already halfway to memory.

In this series, Kiefer blurs photography into painting. Positive, negative, and solarized impressions of sunflowers are layered with splashes of emulsion and tint: these aren't static representations; they're transformations caught mid-motion. The stalks bend, the leaves arc, the seed heads darken, yet something in them keeps moving even as they fail.

Kiefer places the sunflower within a lineage that includes Van Gogh's radiant fields and Nolde's spectral blossoms, yet his vision is darker, pulled harder by history. The flowers stand as monuments to metamorphosis, earthbound and reaching past it. What they leave you with isn't a lesson about renewal. It's the sunflower itself, past its bloom, still turning on its stalk toward a sun it can no longer quite face.