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Descriptif du lot
Spanning three-and-a-half metres in width, Untitled (Australian Trees) (1986) is a dynamic and immersive painting by Per Kirkeby. Its colours—red and ochre earth, leafy greys, flashes of turquoise sky and verticals like pale eucalyptus trunks—are richly evocative without being figurative. Bright whites, dripped washes and scoured impasto create a vivid, textural impression of light, shadow and space. Kirkeby originally trained as a geologist, and painted complex meditations on nature that sought to channel the landscape in profound, elemental terms. His paintings combine spontaneous mark-making, buried and uncovered motifs and echoes of art history, invoking Romanticism, Post-Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, as well as the work of fellow Nordic artists such as Asger Jorn and Edvard Munch. Untitled (Australian Trees) has been shown in major museum exhibitions of Kirkeby’s work at the Centre de Création Contemporain de Tours (1987-1988), IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia (1989-1990) and Tate, London (1998).
During his geological studies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kirkeby travelled to remote areas of Greenland and Arctic Canada. The Arctic’s vast, empty expanses of light and snow left an existential mark on him. ‘You’re about as alone as you can be on this earth up there—with no company but the moon’, he remembered. ‘You feel that you can somehow be swallowed up or disappear in the landscape’ (P. Kirkeby in conversation with M. Peppiatt, Art International, no. 14, Spring 1991, p. 45). He later enrolled at Copenhagen’s Experimental Art School, where he met Joseph Beuys in 1964, and became involved with the happenings of the avant-garde Fluxus group. While painting soon came to dominate his practice, he remained a polymath throughout his career, working in sculpture, filmmaking, poetry, criticism and stage design. By the mid-1980s Kirkeby was an international name, following his participation in the seminal group shows A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1981) and Zeitgeist at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (1982). In 1985, the year before the present work was painted, he staged a major solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.
Kirkeby spent several weeks in Australia with his family from February to March 1986. He kept a travelogue, painted watercolours and sketched and wrote poems in his notebook. While Untitled (Australian Trees) was no doubt informed by this experience, it is not a literal depiction of landscape. Kirkeby’s initial motifs were always subsumed by the inner dynamics of the painting, which itself grew into something like a force of nature. He drew not only upon observed phenomena but also on centuries of art-historical form. Trees, he said, were an iconographic cipher: ‘I draw them, sometimes with historical eyes, a consciousness of a history, at other times with a simulation of observation. But the observation always has historical spectacles on’ (P. Kirkeby, ‘The Trunks’, in S. Sandström and Atopia Projects, eds., Grey Hope: The Persistence of Melancholy, Edinburgh 2006). Untitled (Australian Trees) is a vision of landscape as a force through time as well as space. It becomes a reflection of the human relationship with the world, shifting with changing light, memories and associations.
During his geological studies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kirkeby travelled to remote areas of Greenland and Arctic Canada. The Arctic’s vast, empty expanses of light and snow left an existential mark on him. ‘You’re about as alone as you can be on this earth up there—with no company but the moon’, he remembered. ‘You feel that you can somehow be swallowed up or disappear in the landscape’ (P. Kirkeby in conversation with M. Peppiatt, Art International, no. 14, Spring 1991, p. 45). He later enrolled at Copenhagen’s Experimental Art School, where he met Joseph Beuys in 1964, and became involved with the happenings of the avant-garde Fluxus group. While painting soon came to dominate his practice, he remained a polymath throughout his career, working in sculpture, filmmaking, poetry, criticism and stage design. By the mid-1980s Kirkeby was an international name, following his participation in the seminal group shows A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1981) and Zeitgeist at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (1982). In 1985, the year before the present work was painted, he staged a major solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.
Kirkeby spent several weeks in Australia with his family from February to March 1986. He kept a travelogue, painted watercolours and sketched and wrote poems in his notebook. While Untitled (Australian Trees) was no doubt informed by this experience, it is not a literal depiction of landscape. Kirkeby’s initial motifs were always subsumed by the inner dynamics of the painting, which itself grew into something like a force of nature. He drew not only upon observed phenomena but also on centuries of art-historical form. Trees, he said, were an iconographic cipher: ‘I draw them, sometimes with historical eyes, a consciousness of a history, at other times with a simulation of observation. But the observation always has historical spectacles on’ (P. Kirkeby, ‘The Trunks’, in S. Sandström and Atopia Projects, eds., Grey Hope: The Persistence of Melancholy, Edinburgh 2006). Untitled (Australian Trees) is a vision of landscape as a force through time as well as space. It becomes a reflection of the human relationship with the world, shifting with changing light, memories and associations.