The Louisiana's big autumn exhibition is a large-scale Per Kirkeby show. Literally as well as metaphorically, with over 100 of his best paintings, 50 of his most striking sculptures and a number of works in other genres. These are physically big works: formidable pictures on the monumental scale that fill out the spaces of the museum – ultimate, absolute Kirkeby.

Per Kirkeby is the most significant living painter in the Nordic countries. This year he turns 70, and for more than four decades he has worked with more or less all forms of visual-art genres – from painting, drawing and graphics to stage design and film. Alongside this he is an author and has written poems, essays and artist monographs.

Per Kirkeby: Retrospect I, 1986

Linda Pace Foundation
© Per Kirkeby, Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner Berlin, Cologne & New York

Click on image to enlarge.

A new look at Kirkeby
The exhibition takes its starting point in a new look at Per Kirkeby's art. He has often been seen as an expressive artist who works emotionally and impulsively. However, the exhibited works show the extent to which it is intellectual concepts that create the tension in the pictures and give them content. Concealed in the subjects and the structures to which Kirkeby returns again and again are an important layer of meaning and a method that is important to the understanding of his work.

Briefly put, it is the ambition of the exhibition – besides profiling the indisputable sensual potency of the works – to present some of the intellectual raw material that gives Per Kirkeby's art its insistent weight.

Per Kirkeby: Portrait

Per Kirkeby in front of the painting "Viel später"
Photo/Copyright: Peter Beck

Click on image to enlarge.

The Kirkeby you know but have never seen And if you think you know Per Kirkeby's work inside and out, you will have to think again. The works in the exhibition – with a few exceptions – have all been fetched home from abroad, from museums as well as from the private hoards of collectors. To these we can add a number of the artist's latest works that have not been exhibited before. This is a rare opportunity to encounter the Kirkeby you know but have never seen.

Curator
The exhibiton is developed by Poul Erik Tøjner, executive director Louisiana.