Per Kirkeby: Natures Mortes

Michael Werner Gallery presents Per Kirkeby: Natures Mortes, an exhibition of still life paintings by the eminent Danish painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and author, Per Kirkeby (b. 1938 in Copenhagen, d. 2018 in Copenhagen).

In the 1980s as Kirkeby’s international fame grew, he hit an artistic crisis and leaned towards historic Northern European painting as a way out. In the monumental masterpiece “Fram” from 1983, on loan to the exhibition from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Kirkeby combines compositional elements from two famous Northern European paintings, Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Sea of Ice” from 1823-24 and a 17th century Dutch still life by Willem Claesz Heda. Motifs from these two paintings guide Kirkeby’s painting process, which is heightened by the artist’s sensations after reading the reports of the Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, whose ship was named “Fram” which translates to “forward” or “advance” in Nordic languages.