Press release
Michael Werner Gallery, Cologne, is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by the artist Per Kirkeby from October 29 to December 20, 2003.
„We are a part of nature. This concerns my paintings, and the working process is the same also there. I paint layer on layer, wait, let time pass - much time. That is like a sedimentation. Then suddenly again an eruption follows, as in nature the volcano develops. Everything a very lengthy procedure, which demands much patience. Sometimes I do need more than one year for a picture.“
The exhibition of Kirkeby (born 1938 in Copenhagen) reads like a journey through timeless landscapes, which seem to have grown from dreams or memories. Kirkeby selects fragments, which do not represent concrete landscape, but are associated with details such as sky, earth, rocks, trees, leaves, lily-pads and even reflection effects on water. These elements, which all come from the guidance topic nature, move between the clearly ascertainable and the suggested. Through his choice of colors from the spectrum of earth tones and his completely unique stylistic idiom, Kirkeby is able to impart a feeling for the seasons and the associated sensual experiences.
One almost smells the soil, the grass and the air and loses himself in his landscapes, which touch the soul and which do not have anything kitschy for all romance.
Nature seems to be in constant change, unaffected and original. One rarely finds in Kirkebys pictures traces of humans, as for example in his picture „Gartenfuesse“ (garden feet), where human and vegetable merge.
He achieves a perfect symbiosis of art and science in his works, which meet a claim of exact observation and authenticity. Kirkeby dedicated himself professionally to geology and to art simultaneously. In Copenhagen he studied natural history from 1957 until 1964 and, beginning in 1962, art at the Experimental Art School. Numerous journeys and expeditions conducted him around the globe (Central America, Bali, Polynesien, New Zealand, Morocco, Australia, Greenland, arctic etc.). In Germany he taught for more than two decades as professor for painting, first at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe (1978-1988) and later at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt a. M. (1989-2000). This multilayered artist, who is primarily a painter, likewise expresses his opinion of nature by making sculptures.
For the viewer the paintings of Kirkeby bare themselves as a composition of horizontal layers, reminiscent of the earth’s sediments. Areas of color and networks of lines join to a harmonized unit and show simultaneously views from various perspectives.
Compared with the paintings, the drawings exhibited here possess a more spontaneous approach and illuminate the subject of the tree in the most different facets.
Kirkeby, who is among the most important artists of the 20th Century compresses in his
illusionated landscapes a sentiment of nature and homeland feeling, from whose charm one cannot extract oneself.
A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
