Per Kirkeby – Geology studies; the turn to experimental art
Per Kirkeby was born Per Christensen on 1 September 1938 in Copenhagen. His career was initially not that of an artist; he studied Arctic geology at the university in his hometown and, unlike many of his fellow artists, completed his degree. His particular scientific interest was in the earth history of the ice ages. As a geologist, Kirkeby undertook his first expedition to Narssaq in Greenland in 1958, with further excursions following in subsequent years. His steadily growing interest in art led him, in 1962 and even before completing his doctorate, to join the artist group Den Eksperimenterende Kunstskole, which had recently been founded by the art historian Troels Andersen and the artist Poul Gernes. He experimented early on with graphics and installations and participated in Happenings alongside artists such as Joseph Beuys, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik and Jörg Immendorf.
Germany as a centre of artistic realisation
Following the exciting early phase of his artistic career, Per Kirkeby focused on drawing, initially orienting himself towards Pop Art and rejecting abstraction, especially Informel painting. In 1966 he created the first brick sculptures for which he is still known today, and in 1968 produced his first short film in the style of Andy Warhol. The artist was also politically engaged and supported the aims of the ’68 movement. Alongside a number of other films, Kirkeby undertook further study trips which took him as far as the Maya cult sites in Central America.
In the mid-1970s, Kirkeby created his first oil paintings and, in doing so, made an artistic about-turn towards abstraction, which he had previously so explicitly disregarded. His scientifically trained eye remained formative for his understanding of painting. Kirkeby himself described his paintings as a “summation of structures”, as a “sedimentation of wafer-thin layers” and “in principle, an endless accumulation”, while also emphasising that the underlying structure always breaks through, even when a new layer has a completely different motif and a completely different colour, as quoted by Beat Wismer in the foreword to Per Kirkeby (exhib. cat. Tate Modern, London et al., Ostfildern 2009, p. 10). In this conception of painting, materiality, the observation of nature and the artistic process come together in a particularly characteristic way.
Germany took on an important place in his life: as early as 1978, he accepted a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, later moving to the famous Städelschule in Frankfurt. Kirkeby himself stated that it was only in Germany that he matured into a world artist – a noteworthy statement from a man whose self-confidence was proverbial and who praised himself unabashedly as a really good painter.
Large-format sculptures in public space
Per Kirkeby moved into the public sphere with his large-format sculptures and installations; in Germany, he created a four-storey brick wall in Berlin’s government district as an architectural monument. Kirkeby received numerous prizes and awards for his art, including a DAAD scholarship in 1982 and the Henrik Steffens Prize of the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation F. V. S., which is committed to European understanding and cultural diversity. After a fall in early 2015, Kirkeby could no longer continue working as a painter; even before this, a brain haemorrhage had imposed severe limitations on him. As a result, he turned to art on a theoretical level, writing books on El Greco and Pablo Picasso.
Per Kirkeby died in his native city of Copenhagen on 9 May 2018.
Per Kirkeby - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
