.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘My canvas is the plot of land and my colours—that is, the matter of paint itself—are the soil, the flower beds, with their different components and varying textures’ (Per Kirkeby)
A monumental ode to the natural world, the present painting is an extraordinary work dating from the pinnacle of Per Kirkeby’s practice. Spanning three metres in width and two in height, it offers a vivid painterly panorama, rendered in vibrant tones of green, russet, ochre and blue. Colour unfurls across the canvas in hypnotic layers, alive with the dynamism of windswept branches, rustling leaves and glimmering reflections. Painted in 2012, the year before Kirkeby suffered a tragic brain injury, the work represents the dazzling culmination of a rich and varied career. While celebrated for his scintillating abstract landscapes inspired by his native Denmark, he also explored performance, writing, sculpture, film, set design and installation. In the present work, these strands seem to come together in a vast, near-cinematic tableau that bristles with poetry and drama. A major example of the artist’s visionary language, the work was a centrepiece of his solo exhibition at the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg shortly after its creation.
Kirkeby was originally a student of geology, receiving his master’s degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1964. During his studies he undertook two expeditions to Greenland, as well as visiting Central America and the Arctic. His interest in the underlying structures of the natural landscape would have an important influence upon his painterly practice. He would later speak of his canvases as ‘collapse structures’, using a term borrowed from geological theories of landscape and slump. ‘I like to get pictures going with some form of battleground in which certain things have to be defeated in order that something else may emerge’, he explained (P. Kirkeby, Samtaler med Lars Morell, Borgen 1997, p. 142). In the present work, paint takes on the organic qualities of nature itself, layering like sediment, splintering like bark and rippling like water. In the slippage between abstraction and figuration, all sense of perspective dissolves. Hints of known phenomena slip in and out of focus; reality and illusion become entangled, bound together in fragile conflict.
Kirkeby’s intuitive handling of paint has frequently led him to be associated with Neo-Expressionist artists such as Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff. At the same time, his works have been seen to continue a Northern European landscape tradition that has its roots in the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Kirkeby’s influences, indeed, were wide ranging: from Eugène Delacroix, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne to Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. The present work conjures the luminous landscapes of Pierre Bonnard; equally it shares much in common with the thick, tactile textures of Peter Doig. Kirkeby’s world, however, ultimately extended beyond the scope of painting. His early practice intersected with Copenhagen’s Experimental Art School, the Fluxus movement and the work of Joseph Beuys. Later he would collaborate with the director Lars von Trier, designing visual effects for three of his films. The present work captures something of his eclectic approach to art-making: an electrifying, almost shamanistic vision of nature that crackles with improvised magic and mystery.
A monumental ode to the natural world, the present painting is an extraordinary work dating from the pinnacle of Per Kirkeby’s practice. Spanning three metres in width and two in height, it offers a vivid painterly panorama, rendered in vibrant tones of green, russet, ochre and blue. Colour unfurls across the canvas in hypnotic layers, alive with the dynamism of windswept branches, rustling leaves and glimmering reflections. Painted in 2012, the year before Kirkeby suffered a tragic brain injury, the work represents the dazzling culmination of a rich and varied career. While celebrated for his scintillating abstract landscapes inspired by his native Denmark, he also explored performance, writing, sculpture, film, set design and installation. In the present work, these strands seem to come together in a vast, near-cinematic tableau that bristles with poetry and drama. A major example of the artist’s visionary language, the work was a centrepiece of his solo exhibition at the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg shortly after its creation.
Kirkeby was originally a student of geology, receiving his master’s degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1964. During his studies he undertook two expeditions to Greenland, as well as visiting Central America and the Arctic. His interest in the underlying structures of the natural landscape would have an important influence upon his painterly practice. He would later speak of his canvases as ‘collapse structures’, using a term borrowed from geological theories of landscape and slump. ‘I like to get pictures going with some form of battleground in which certain things have to be defeated in order that something else may emerge’, he explained (P. Kirkeby, Samtaler med Lars Morell, Borgen 1997, p. 142). In the present work, paint takes on the organic qualities of nature itself, layering like sediment, splintering like bark and rippling like water. In the slippage between abstraction and figuration, all sense of perspective dissolves. Hints of known phenomena slip in and out of focus; reality and illusion become entangled, bound together in fragile conflict.
Kirkeby’s intuitive handling of paint has frequently led him to be associated with Neo-Expressionist artists such as Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff. At the same time, his works have been seen to continue a Northern European landscape tradition that has its roots in the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Kirkeby’s influences, indeed, were wide ranging: from Eugène Delacroix, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne to Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists. The present work conjures the luminous landscapes of Pierre Bonnard; equally it shares much in common with the thick, tactile textures of Peter Doig. Kirkeby’s world, however, ultimately extended beyond the scope of painting. His early practice intersected with Copenhagen’s Experimental Art School, the Fluxus movement and the work of Joseph Beuys. Later he would collaborate with the director Lars von Trier, designing visual effects for three of his films. The present work captures something of his eclectic approach to art-making: an electrifying, almost shamanistic vision of nature that crackles with improvised magic and mystery.