Description

Accompanying a memorial retrospective for Danish artist Per Kirkeby (1938-2018), this catalog traces the career of this exemplar of Neoexpressionist and postmodern art through more than 100 representative paintings, sculptures and drawings. Its starting point is Kirkeby's early hardboard paintings; from there, it examines his little-known overpaintings of found paintings; abstract landscapes made from the late 1960s on; and his bronze sculptures of the 1980s that explore human corporeality, and his pseudoarchitectural sculptures.

Kirkeby rose to international prominence in the early 1980s, alongside painters such as Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz, A.R. Penck and Georg Baselitz. Unlike these contemporaries, who were mainly based in Germany, Kirkeby was mostly based in Copenhagen, and often alluded to the significance of the Danish landscape and its formations on his paintings. These works, often seen as a continuation of the Northern European landscape tradition begun by Caspar David Friedrich, evoke the textures of earth and geological shifts.