INDOC. Documentation Centre about Art and Nature

Per Kirkeby exhibition opens at the CDAN

The show will run until 18 October, but the summer is a particularly good time to visit the exhibition and make a trip to the municipality of Plan (in the Gistaín Valley), where Kirkeby has executed the seventh landscape installation to be added to the CDAN’s Art and Nature collection.

Per Kirkeby (Copenhagen, 1938) started studying Geology at the University of Copenhagen, since his youth has garnered a broad scientific knowledge and philosophy. Later he enrolled at the Experimental Art School (Ex School) in Copenhagen, where he centred on painting, graphics, 8mm film and performance. His profound engagement with nature has enabled him to use it as a tool to present his particular form of viewing the world.

The CDAN exhibition is not a retrospective. Rather, it showcases two series comprised of 39 blackboard works and 33 models. Per Kirkeby’s work cannot be classified in any one genre. In fact, it might seem as if the chalk drawings on blackboards in the exhibition hall were made by a different artist to the one who created the sculptural work in Plan, in the Gistaín valley. On many occasions, Kirkeby himself demands that exhibitions of his work include a mix of these medium in order to evidence this facet of his production.

As a painter he holds a key place in European art from the mid 1980s onwards, when his painting reached maturity and began to be recognised as one of the most genuine exponents of the new painting that appeared at that time. His blackboards, which can be considered a genre in their own right within his overall body of work since he began them in 1971, are like a kind of inventory, alphabet or iconographic vocabulary of his visual experience.

If one were to take a summary look at Per Kirkeby’s paintings, an initial glance would tell you that you are contemplating abstract works, created with grand gestures of strokes of colour. However, a more attentive look will tell the beholder that they contain a structure, that they are girded, that the colours have been applied in overlayered glazes, that there are subtle chromatic interrelationships and that the sum of all these details gives each picture a powerful sense of coherence.

It appears that Per Kirkeby’s interest in modelling and sculpture can be traced back to his admiration for Auguste Rodin, the non finito that compels the beholder to make the effort to complete in his imagination the forms that have only been insinuated. In any case, in the works Per Kirkeby makes in plaster, to later cast in bronze, as we can see in the “models” on show in this exhibition, one can also appreciate an expressive way of treating the modelling reminiscent of Rodin, giving more emphasis to suggestion than to the actual concretion of volumes. The bronzes are like an attempt to materialize painting, as if the painting had taken on physical reality.

At the entrance to the CDAN building, visitors will find a work made of brick. The structure recreates the perimeter of the piece designed by the Danish artist for the landscape of Plan.

The importance of Kirkeby’s work in the contemporary international context is reflected in the fact that both the CDAN and London’s Tate Modern are staging solo exhibitions of his work this summer.

More information

CDAN. Centro de Arte y Naturaleza
Fundación Beulas

Avda. Dr. Artero, s/n
22004-Huesca
SPAIN

Tel.: +34 974 23 98 93
E-mail: info@cdan.es

• Per Kirkeby's exhibition at the CDAN

Source: texts and photos, CDAN. The photo at the top of the page shows the work Ohne Titel (1991). In the photo at the bottom of the page, taken during the opening of the exhibition, some visitors can be seen looking at models by Per Kirkeby.

6 Printable version              Q Back to newsletter contents