Gagosian is pleased to announce Anselm Kiefer: Seal my ears shut and I shall hear you still. Opening on May 15 at 541 West 24th Street, the exhibition features a new group of paintings that advance Kiefer’s ongoing exploration of feminine archetypes and landscape as symbolic form.

For the works on view, Kiefer drew inspiration from poet Rainer Maria Rilke, painter Caspar David Friedrich, and female figures from classical mythology who connect landscapes with allegorical narratives. Incorporating thickly textured layers that emphasize materiality and transformation to embody the luminosity, growth, and movement found in nature, the paintings are executed in oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, collaged canvas, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis. That last material is a deep verdigris green produced when a bath of copper, salts, and fluids is exposed to electrical current—a process that is a physical realization of the artist’s long-standing interest in alchemy.

In Für R.M.R. wirf mir die ohren zu: ich kann dich hören (For R.M.R. seal my ears shut and I shall hear you still, 2023–25), a face emerges from the rough surface of a boulder. The painting is inscribed with a verse from The book of hours, which Rilke wrote in three parts between 1899 and 1903, overlapping the time when he was a secretary for sculptor Auguste Rodin. Titled after a medieval book of prayers, these lyrical poems explore a contemplative search for spiritual understanding.

In Naturwirklichkeit und kunstwahrheit (Natural reality and artistic truth, 2005–25), a painter’s palette is positioned over a landscape of bare limbs in black, brown, and gray tones. The palette—a recurring symbol for Kiefer of the potential of art and the role of the artist—appears as an outline set against the landscape behind it, while also holding pools of saturated color that recur in passages found throughout the composition. The title draws from Caspar David Friedrich: Naturwirklichkeit und kunstwahrheit, art historian Werner Hofmann’s landmark study of how the German Romantic imbued his precise representations of natural landscapes with metaphysical and psychological significance.

The largest group of paintings on view features representations of female figures and faces immersed in dense landscapes, including nymphs from classical mythology (Claea, Electra, and Neaera) who serve as allegorical personifications linked to natural sites. Other paintings draw upon mythic narratives of metamorphosis, including the transformations of Dryope into a lotus tree, Clytie into a heliotrope flower, and Leucothoe into a frankincense tree. Tyche (2024) pictures the goddess of fortune and civic prosperity as seen from behind, wrapped in billowing fabric and suspended over a ringed formation of megalithic stones.

The paintings in Seal my ears shut and I shall hear you still extend themes found in two major exhibitions, Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the sea at the Saint Louis Art Museum (2025–26) and Anselm Kiefer: Le alchimiste, on view through September 27, 2026, at Palazzo Reale, Milan. Kiefer’s first US retrospective in twenty years, Becoming the sea united paintings and sculptures from throughout his career with new monumental landscape paintings inspired by the Rhine and the Mississippi. Le alchimiste pays tribute to forgotten female alchemists, a branch of Kiefer’s broader practice of representing feminine archetypes and the historical accomplishments of women.