Pe

r K

irK

eb

y

Per KirKebyretrospective

Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition‘Per Kirkeby and the “Forbidden Paintings” of Kurt Schwitters’,Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels10 February – 20 May 2012

9 789085 866275 >

ISBN 978-90-8586-627-5

13

38. Skumring (Twilight), 1983Oil on canvas200 x 250 cm

26

PER KIRKEBY

Kirke by work contains none of the powerful gestural visual lan gu age of the manuscript. However, the title is not meant just as a description but evokes an atmosphere of the kind exuded by precious works of a past epoch. Over the following years Kirkeby’s compositions were often domi-nated by a strong golden yellow, and their struc ture recall-ed the flatness of Byzantine panels or Early Renaissance paintings. In this way he approached a reli giously inspired art whose ico no graphy he sometimes alluded to in details. In Vermisst die Welt (Missing the World, 1997) [cat. 58, p. 30], for instance, we find rocky pinnacles like those in works by Giotto or Duccio. Many of the picture titles of this period reflect a concern with pictorial types or themes of Christian art, such as Flugten til Ægypten (Flight into Egypt), Anastasis and Nikopeia. Byzantine iconoclasm, which along with its theological implications was exploited for centuries as a means in power struggles,18 was associated by Kirkeby with the struggles of his early years, revolving around the questions of whether painting was still permissible or whether its moral impetus must be sacrificed. On the basis of the complex painting approach and pictorial structure now at his disposal, he could masterfully address this problem from various angles without becoming entangled in fruitless alternatives. And he had the opportunity to visualize various levels of thought with the aid of quo-tations from his own work.

This tendency started after 2000. Kirkeby referred back to his major 1982 painting Fram [cat. 37, p. 31], named after Fridtjof Nansen’s expedition ship [used in the nineteenth century for polar expeditions, ed.], and in which he quoted from Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823–4) and a seventeenth-century still life by Willem Claesz. Heda.19 In many works from the 1990s onwards, wooden structures or tree stumps already occurred, metamorphoses of the earlier tree motifs prompted by early Italian painting, which was still influenced by Byzantine art. Allusions are found to the wood of Christ’s Cross, the nails of the Passion, and the rock of Golgotha.

If we dare to advance an interpretation of the composition of Fram (i.e. ‘forward’), we might begin by saying that all of the elements in the picture have a greyish-white hue that signals danger—the threatened ship, the ice, the upturned chalice from the still life. The table edges from Netherlandish painting are also present, recast by Kirkeby as verges of an abyss into which painting and what is associated with it might fall. This existential feeling, which

was overlain in the 1980s and 90s by allusions to fourteenth and fifteenth-century traditions, broke through again in the works of the last decade. The pictorial structure changed accordingly, for now the focus was not on observation but on quotation and memory, if actualized by the visual energy of the here and now. This is why reality and the artist’s own work were utilized, indeed cannibalized, because by now Kirkeby no longer found himself in the situation of an apprentice to nature and its observation but in the position of an authority—that is, someone who, for all his doubts, had developed certainty about many things.

A large painting, Untitled (2010) [cat. 69], can be described as a syn thesis at this point. In the central band we can make out vessels in a still life that are standing and lying at the edge of a table covered with a tablecloth. Above these we see textures that can be read either as a fabric curtain or as geological structures. Strangely, a green, toy-like horse enters the picture space from the right. Stiff and unreal, it is a foreign body in the composition. Yet this motif is no stranger to Kirkeby’s iconography, having first appeared in 1981. So it represents a self-quotation on the artist’s part, although it’s not his own invention, for the depiction of a horse originates from a woodcut dated 1534 by the German Renaissance master Hans Baldung Grien.

Looking at the basic structure of the large-format pain t-ing, we notice a similarity with the painted collages of the 1970s. The impression of unreality that makes the composition seem to flicker, despite all the moments of observation it contains, is likewise reminiscent of this early phase. The fragile still life stands for the existential shock that constitutes one of the motivations of Kirkeby’s art and found an early expression in the idea of entropy. The green horse eludes straightforward interpretation. The fighting spirit and instinctual character of Baldung’s stallion has vanished from the green horse, which has the appearance of a threatening yet tamed memory.

With Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty in mind, a painting of this type can be seen less to evoke visible reality in terms of structures than an atmosphere that lends the visual a reversed direction. The structure of the composition has the fragility of a perceptional memory. This is just as random as a perception of nature, and claims to convey a truth. Yet this truth can only be approached atmospherically by assembling the fragments into a signature or sign for which it is valid. This atmosphere produces a potential

27

69. Untitled, 2010Tempera on canvas

200 x 300 cm

INTRODUCTION

38

EARLY WORKS

39

2. Bilebilleder (Car Pictures), 1964Mixed media on masonite4 panels, each 122 x 85 cm

lebi

86

48. Urwald (Primary Forest), 1988Oil on canvas250 x 365 cm

87

50. Cossus ligniperda, 1989Oil on canvas290 x 350 cm

88

53. Holz VII (Wood VII), 1994Oil on canvas200 x 130 cm

89

52. Viel später (Much later), 1992Oil on canvas

300 x 479.5 cm

128

31. Untitled, 1981Overpainting, oil on canvas

63 x 63 cm

129

32. Untitled, 1982Overpainting, oil on canvas

60 x 80 cm

138

The Sculpture of Per Kirkeby

Kosme de Barañano

[ill. 8]Clay models in the artist’s studio

Photo Jens Lindhe

139

Of the sculptures in this retrospective exhibition of works by Per Kirkeby, we encounter 15 pieces that are models for large-scale brick sculptures, more than half of which date from the 1980s. In addition, there are 19 bronze pieces, each from editions of six, that may be classed in three groups: small-format models, such as Tor (Gate, 1981); bronzes measuring around 80 to 90 cm, with forms that evoke heads or arms—that is, the classical ‘torso’; and large-format pieces, such as Figures and Torsos, that are 2 m tall and are highly ab stract.

If Kirkeby’s sculptural work from the early 1970s on wards is taken as a whole, we can divide it into two main groups: outdoor brick constructions that are dis played in more than 50 cities across the world; and bron zes, among which the three groups in this exhi bi tion may be considered.

The history of sculpting since prehistoric times has made a division between sculptors who carve and sculp tors who model. Michelangelo aptly distinguished these two methods as sculpting per forza di levare and sculpting per via di porre. The former approach, that of carving, in volves working with stone or wood, as was the case with Michelangelo himself; the foundry and fire, as with Chillida; or cutting sheet metal, as with Calder. The latter approach, that of modelling, involves clay or wax, a material that yields to the hand’s imprint and pressure, and was the method practised by Rodin and Cellini.

Kirkeby has used both methods in his sculptural practice. His brick sculptures are constructed; his bronzes (inclu ding the modelli for the brick structures) are modelled. Kirke-by’s sculptural work is part of a highly unusual category in the history of twentieth-century sculpture: sculpture made by painters. A summary analysis of the ferment that the alchemy of twentieth/twenty-first century sculpture produced, with as many creators as during the Italian Quattrocento, shows that it resulted from a variety of inspirations:– The evolution of nineteenth-century sculpture—Auguste

Rodin, Medardo Rosso, the influence of Impressionism, light, the torso, sculpture d’après sculpture and not d’après nature. These do not negate but rather transform a pre-existing traditional plastic vocabulary.

– The influence of the so-called ‘primitive’ arts on not only artists (André Derain, Julio González, Joaquín Torres-García, etc.) but also on collectors, encouraging the foun ding of ethnographic museums (Paris, Dresden, etc.) that were for the display of ‘objectual art’ of non-Europ ean civilizations.

– The notion of construction and objects, the Dada vision, Kurt Schwitters, the Constructivists, the poetry of mater-ials and the consequences of Cubism, especially Picasso.

– Formal simplicity, the denial of modernism from within itself, Constantin Brancusi with his radical anti-natural-ism, the quest for non-rhetorical sculpture (that is, sculp-ture based solely on the poetry of pure form).

121. Kopf und Arm I (Head and Arm I), 1985Bronze, edition 6+0, cast 6/6

52 x 10 x 32 cm

109. Tor (Gate), 1981Bronze, edition 6+0, cast 0

36 x 23 x 15 cm

154

Pulsating like an Accordion: Per Kirkeby’s Brick Sculptures

Ulrich Wilmes

151. Untitled, n.d.Gouache, pencil on paper

65 x 100 cm

146. Untitled, 1997Pastel, gouache, pencil on paper

65 x 100 cm

148. Untitled, 1997Pastel, gouache, pencil on paper

65 x 100 cm

144. Untitled, 1996Pastel, gouache, pencil on paper

65 x 100 cm

155

Per Kirkeby’s works in general and his brick sculptures in particular are closely linked with historical idiosyncracies and developments in Danish art and architecture. These special paths he identified and experienced have been followed throughout his career. Kirkeby has placed trust in his biographical formation and his tendency to conduct historical thinking in the present day. This explains why his approach to artistic practice led, under these special conditions, to spaces of experience foreign to art, prompted by his scepticism with regard to conventional academic training. This decision reflected his great self-confidence. Although he naturally could not be sure of his intentions back then, he understood his training as a geologist and the accumulation of extraordinary knowledge and expe-riences to which his studies and expeditions led as prov-iding a direct path to art. On the one hand, the expe riences gained in Greenland and later Central America crucially shaped Kirkeby’s artistic stance. On the other, an intensive involvement with the art history of Scandinavia was part and parcel of his identity as an artist. Nor should we forget in this connection Kirkeby’s active participation in the legendary Copenhagen art scene in the early 1960s, whose point of departure and centre was the Eks-skolen (The Experimental Art School), which Kirkeby entered in 1962 while he was still studying geology. This artistic climate provided him with key insights into avant-garde practice, especially in the field of sculpture. Here Kirkeby found a

field of experimentation against whose background he pur-sued his own, new approaches to contemporary sculpture.

The confrontation with Kirkeby’s sculptures is characte-r ized by their range of various configurations, which possess no formal signature by which they might be clearly linked. Hence they frequently suggest a visual contradiction, which for the artist, however, does not exist. In his sculptures in brick and bronze Kirkeby pursues two models, or methods, of materializing his formal ideas. In other words, they are linked by an analogy of thinking that corresponds to two objects of depiction, the human figure and architectural form. Still, in both motif areas the relationship of the finished configuration to the original model can be no more than vaguely traced.

Kirkeby’s visual intentions invariably move between the material and structural determinants of empirical spaces drawn from his biography (urban landscape) and his scientific research work (natural landscape). In other words, his analysis and description of an object take place on the basis of its substantial qualities and their physical appropriation, which together constitute what he terms content. In this sense, his artistic approach is directed towards revealing a hidden or covert motif or theme. The brick sculptures represent a synthesis of sculptural form and architectural structure. Kirkeby’s consciousness of

[ill. 10]Versthimmerlands-Gymnasium, Ars, Denmark, 1986-1993

Photo Jens Lindhe

[ill.11]Middelheim, Openluchtmuseum voor Beeldhouwkunst,

Antwerp, Belgium, 1993Photo Jens Lindhe

172

Kurt Schwitters165. Lysaker, c. 1939

Oil on plywood85.5 x 78 cm

THE ‘FORBIDDEN PAINTINGS’ OF KURT SCHWITTERS

173

Kurt Schwitters163. Untitled (Norwegian Landscape near Åndalsnes), 1939

Oil on wood60 x 70 cm