Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy - exhibition review

In the Royal Academy’s courtyard, you’re immediately confronted with the ambition and complexity of Anselm Kiefer’s work: here are a couple of enormous vitrines filled with lead ships and submarines, one resting on a bed of cracking clay. It draws on a bonkers numerological theory about sea battles by Velimir Khlebnikov, a Russian futurist poet.

Mythology, war, poetry, death — Kiefer makes big art with big themes. Even in his more modest early work, his sense of grand gestures is clear. In a photograph, he’s in his father’s army uniform, giving the Nazi salute, confronting a history he’d been shielded from at school. The satirical motivation for this act is clear in the deliberately naive and pathetic Heroic Symbols series (1970), in which Kiefer paints himself giving the salute on the banks of the Rhine, with overblown classical statues hovering above him.

Although many core symbols and themes were present from the start, Kiefer took time to find the language that suited his ambitions. But in the Eighties, it emerged: an expressive maelstrom of oil paint, handwritten text, and everything from straw and ash to sand and diamonds, often completed with huge objects hanging or pressed into the surface, from alchemical instruments to sunflowers and books. These are not so much paintings as total environments — they swallow you up.

It’s a language that fits Kiefer’s enormous and often consciously esoteric subjects, which constantly expand, with alchemy, the Kabbalah, Egyptology and cosmology among them.

Too much of this and he can be an overbearing bore but this is a beautifully judged show. Kiefer’s latest paintings, channeling Van Gogh as a means of tackling the American government’s 1944 Morgenthau plan to turn Germany from an industrial to an agricultural nation, are his best in years. His journey is far from complete.

Until Dec 14 (020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk)