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Kirkeby exhibit big on color, landscapes
Chicago Tribune
Alan Artner
14 June 2007
Per Kirkeby, the veteran Danish artist who is having his first solo exhibition in the Midwest at the Arts Club of Chicago, is best appreciated as a painter of rural landscapes despite his having emphatically declared himself a man of the city.
Chicago TribuneAlan Artner
14 June 2007
The show offers 47 paintings, drawings and sculptures from the work of three decades. Kirkeby's sculptures show interest in the human body and architecture. But the paintings and drawings are stronger, and the ones on view nearly always evoke landscapes, even when they clearly are abstractions.
The artist, who once was influenced by Pop Art and participated in early performance pieces, has been called a "lyric expressionist," presumably because his paintings show so little sign of existential anguish. Instead, the strong personal element turns up in a grandeur that goes back to earlier ideas about painting.
The heroic scale of Kirkeby's pictures comes from American Abstract Expressionism, but the canvas here seems less an arena for working out internal struggle than a site for the creation of murals or screens, which is to say, grand decorations. Such projects have a distinguished European history, and Kirkeby has entered it in recent years with immense paintings for a library and university. All of the canvases on view at the Arts Club are, of course, independent, but they carry over some of the splendor of great European decorative paintings from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries.
That comes partly from the way Kirkeby has created them from patches of color, layer upon layer. He is both an artist and a geologist, and he has derived his layering from geophysical processes. But color functions as form in his pictures, and the result is not unlike, say, the landscape in Paul Serusier's "The Talisman," which illustrates Maurice Denis' famous remark that before it depicts anything a painting is "a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order."
The sense that decorative pattern is primary in Kirkeby's paintings is what withholds us from interpreting them as mystical representations of nature. But his brooding color combined with frequent suggestions of cave, crevice and cataract give a physical ruggedness that we know becomes spiritual in the works of 19th Century Romantic writers, and that is an association difficult to shake.
Yet Kirkeby also is a restless experimenter and his works do not look the same from group to group or medium to medium. So some two-dimensional pieces here resemble blackboard drawings and some sculptures suggest Mayan rather than Western European sources. This comes across as an avoidance of a "signature" style that is much in favor nowadays, though there remains the sense that a more typical Kirkeby will still involve hints of landscape.
At the start of the 1980s, Kirkeby was included in the now-famous "New Spirit in Painting" show that asserted the power and variety of contemporary work. More than a quarter century elapsed before Chicagoans were able to examine his power and variety, but now that it's possible, the opportunity should definitely be taken. ---------- aartner@tribune.com
"Per Kirkeby" continues at the Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario St., through July 26.
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
