Per Kirkeby: Geological Messages: Paintings from 1965-2015

Michael Werner Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Danish artist Per Kirkeby (1938-2018). Taking the form of a small retrospective, the show focuses on the artist’s lifelong engagement with landscape, geology, and the natural world.

Kirkeby’s interest in visible and invisible structures that configure the physical world has been well-documented. The artist studied geology in the 1950s, travelling on expeditions to Greenland and the Arctic. Making a radical shift in his life, Kirkeby decided to become an artist and enrolled in Copenhagen’s Experimental Art School in the early 1960s.

One of Scandinavia’s most important 20th-century artists, Kirkeby followed the tradition of Northern European painters like Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch. Like his predecessors, the artist sought to encapsulate the light and patterns of the landscape of his homeland on canvas. Trained as a geologist, Kirkeby understood the earth to be geologically unstable and continually moving between states of mineral complexity and processes of collapse. These terrestrial changes were recognized by Kirkeby to be inherently connected to the indescribable attributes of the human experience. It was through painting, drawing, and sculpture that he searched for ways to connect with the realities of an ever-changing world.