Anselm Kiefer’s work is so well known, and has been so extensively written about and exhibited, one wondered what “Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth,” a traveling survey recently at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, could possibly add to the dialogue. The answer: both not much and a whole lot.

Positing the artist’s inquiry into spirituality—a Sisyphean search for heaven in particular—as a key to understanding his symbolically rich, historically layered oeuvre, curator Michael Auping organized a deeply engrossing, thematically focused survey. One way to begin considering this exhibition is to