Per Kirkeby is back in a big way at the Centre for Fine Arts, where a major retrospective exhibition devoted to the Danish avant-garde artist opens this week. We met Kirkeby in his house and studio on the outskirts of Copenhagen.
The 'old-fashioned paintings' of Per Kirkeby
The Danish painter and sculptor Per Kirkeby (born in 1938) enjoyed his greatest success in the 1980s, when he was seen as a leading exponent of the German avant-garde, with which he was in close contact. After that period, things went relatively quiet around Kirkeby. But that changed just over two years ago, when Tate Modern devoted a big retrospective exhibition to the Danish artist. Bozar has picked up on this renewed interest in Kirkeby. His work had been shown at the Centre for Fine Arts back in 1981 and 1988 and now he has his first major retrospective exhibition there in the context of the Danish presidency of the European Union.
(Per Kirkeby “Vermisst die Welt”, 1997 © Folkwang Museum Essen)
Per Kirkeby is a many-sided artist. He is best known for his paintings, but he is also a geologist and a scientist. And a sculptor, architect, film-maker, poet, writer, and essayist. The exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts concentrates on his painting. The approach is an unusual one. Bozar has set up a dialogue between Kirkeby’s works and the (traditional) landscape paintings of the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters painted the works in question in the 1930s in Norway, where he had fled from the Nazis. His landscapes have played an important role in relation to Kirkeby’s oeuvre. Kirkeby was the first person to publish anything about those paintings, at a time when critics only had eyes for the German artist’s Dadaist collages. For Kirkeby, who owns some of his works, these are “forbidden paintings”: they are so traditional that in the avant-garde era in which Schwitters lived they were seen as almost indecent. The parallel is not hard to find: Kirkeby, too, finds that his own paintings do not fit in with the prevailing artistic climate.
Read the full article in AGENDA, page 10-11.
Lees het Nederlandstalige artikel op brusselnieuws.be.
Per Kirkeby
9/2 > 20/5 • di/ma/Tu > zo/di/Su 10 > 18.00 (do/je/Th > 21.00), €3,50 > 10
Paleis voor Schone Kunsten/Palais des Beaux-Arts rue Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussel/Bruxelles,
02-507.82.00, info@bozar.be, www.bozar.be
Per Kirkeby is a many-sided artist. He is best known for his paintings, but he is also a geologist and a scientist. And a sculptor, architect, film-maker, poet, writer, and essayist. The exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts concentrates on his painting. The approach is an unusual one. Bozar has set up a dialogue between Kirkeby’s works and the (traditional) landscape paintings of the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters painted the works in question in the 1930s in Norway, where he had fled from the Nazis. His landscapes have played an important role in relation to Kirkeby’s oeuvre. Kirkeby was the first person to publish anything about those paintings, at a time when critics only had eyes for the German artist’s Dadaist collages. For Kirkeby, who owns some of his works, these are “forbidden paintings”: they are so traditional that in the avant-garde era in which Schwitters lived they were seen as almost indecent. The parallel is not hard to find: Kirkeby, too, finds that his own paintings do not fit in with the prevailing artistic climate.
Read the full article in AGENDA, page 10-11.
Lees het Nederlandstalige artikel op brusselnieuws.be.
Per Kirkeby
9/2 > 20/5 • di/ma/Tu > zo/di/Su 10 > 18.00 (do/je/Th > 21.00), €3,50 > 10
Paleis voor Schone Kunsten/Palais des Beaux-Arts rue Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussel/Bruxelles,
02-507.82.00, info@bozar.be, www.bozar.be
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