Sunflowers

Sunflowers (Tournesols, 1996) belongs to a series of images that Kiefer created by juxtaposing the fossilized forms of dark sunflowers with the image of a naked man. While the figure bears a significant resemblance to the artist, the man is usually identified as Robert Fludd (1574–1637), an English philosopher and Occultist who believed that every plant in the world had its own equivalent star in the firmament, and that there was a connection between the microcosmic world of the earth and the macrocosmic world of the heavens. (Fludd's ideas also inspired Kiefer's book For Robert Fludd [Für Robert Fludd, 1995–96], in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao collection.) This image similarly implies a linking of the individual to the surrounding cosmos.