Per Kirkeby is a careful observer and expects exactly this calmness and absolute devotion to the visual impression from the recipients of his work. Kirkeby, who died five years ago in his native town Copenhagen, is considered the internationally best-known Danish artist of his generation and one of the most important European contemporaries. "I see my paintings as a summation of structures. A sedimentation of wafer-thin layers. […] In principle, an endless deposit. But it is striking that the underlying structure always breaks through, even when a new layer shows a completely different motif and a has a completely different color." (Quoted from: Per Kirkeby, ex. cat. Tate Modern, London et al., 2009/10, p. 10) Kirkeby's pictorial structure creates a fascinating depth effect through precisely those layers. Kirkeby's enraptured creations hint at the background in science of their creator. Because Kirkeby's decision to become a painter was preceded by his studies of geology. Inspirations from nature and atmospherically dense landscape impressions play a fundamental role in Kirkeby's works. The motifs borrowed from nature - water, trees, mountains, stones and caves,, as well as architectural forms and fragmented body parts - do not result in a homogeneous landscape or figure image. Instead they are created according to the principle of all-over painting, in which different formal ideas and sensory impressions are equally placed side by like on a kind of notepad. Kirkeby, who not only finds his inspiration directly in nature, but also in the landscape impressions of European Romantic painting, often begins his paintings in the edges. They have no real center and deny any hierarchy of pictorial elements. Rather, the artist seems to follow the unpredictable course of his intuition in the process of creation, which allows the composition to grow and emerge like a thought. For this reason, Richard Shiff described Kirkeby as a "reversed Picasso" in his contribution to the catalog for the solo exhibition at the Museum Kunst Palast and at Tate Modern in 2009/10. In contrast to Picasso's analytical Cubism, objects are not formally disassembled and broken up into multiple perspectives in Kirkeby's paintings, instead he formulates a complex thought as a sum of individual elements, like on a blackboard or a notepad.
Today Kirkeby's impressive painterly oeuvre is part of important collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, the Center Pompidou, Paris, the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. [JS]