Per Kirkeby

Private Collection, Austria (acquired directly from the artist)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Untitled, executed in 1964, is an unusual example of Per Kirkeby’s exceptional painterly style, drawn to associations of Abstract Expressionism and the tradition of European landscape painting. Although knowing at an early age that he wanted to be an artist, Kirkeby first studied geology at the University of Copenhagen, where he graduated in 1964. For his studies, he participated in various geological fieldworks in Greenland, to study rock formations and sketching them in his freetime. Although abstract, the present work, forms resembling mountain peaks, houses and water seem to emerge from its topography, and its light pink, blue and yellow colours create a feeling of sunrises and twilight. Kirkeby’s resulting aesthetic language and unique style of abstraction, as is exemplified in this work, is thus imbued with a long-held fascination in the transience of the earth’s surface, its energy, rocks, and minerals, as well as the natural environments of his native Denmark.

"When I paint a picture the actual process of painting reminds me, in many respects, of the processes which took place, over a very long period of time, when the world and its landscapes were first being created" (Per Kirkeby cited in: D. Galloway, 'Painted Landscape that Absorb Geology', International Herald Tribune, New York, 6 March 1999). 

Kirkeby, with a career spanning over five decades, embraced the medium of painting and its history, establishing a Neo-Expressionist style, that can loosely be related to German artists such as Georg Baselity, Jörg Immendorff and Markus Lüpertz. Whereas in the 1960s the attractive immediacy of Pop art looked at painting as an outdated art form, these artists revived a more emotional energy and spirit in painting, refining dynamic, gestural aesthetic languages that hovered on the precipice between abstraction and figuration. 

Per Kirkeby represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and returned to exhibit three further times (in 1980, 1993 and 1997). He also participated in two editions of the Documenta in Kassel in 1982 and 1992. Kirkeby further had a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London in 2009.