Per Kirkeby, born in 1938 in Copenhagen, is considered internationally to be the most significant Scandinavian artist of the present. The versatility of his oeuvre since the early 1960s is staggering: Kirkeby paints, draws and makes prints, he is likewise a sculptor, an architect, a filmmaker and a poet.

His career began in 1957 with a degree in geology in Copenhagen, which he completed with a doctorate in 1964. In 1958 he took part in an expedition to Greenland where he first documented impressions of the landscape in pictorial form. He was intrigued by rock structures and by the structural composition of many other materials, which he investigated through drawing, and from the 1970s, – as components of a complex idea of the landscape – increasingly through his painting.

Colour compositions emerge from these investigations with their own specific visual language of layering and painterly perception. There are associations to nature that sometimes become legible – in elements of landscape, architectural features, hints of flora and fauna – but then become turbidly secretive, darkened in earth-colours or in vegetal patterns. The latter are reminiscent of foliage, grass or lichens, and thus more responsive to perception – often in a mysterious vibration consisting of both structure and a painterly-poetic aura. Kirkeby expresses it far more soberly: “My relationship to the landscape is of a professional kind, but I do see myself as a painter concerned with space who uses various tricks and asks himself what it is that we normally designate landscape.” (Kirkeby in conversation with H.N. Jocks in Kunstforum International, 135/1996).   Read More