PER KIRKEBY
Copenhague,(Denmark) 1938- Copenhague,(Denmark) 2018

While studying natural science and geology at Copenhagen University, in 1962 he enrolled at the Eksperimenterende Kunstkole (School of Experimental Art) in Copenhagen, where he studied painting, engraving, films and physical expression. His early abstractions were replaced by figurative painting with strong colouring and Pop resonances, which he exhibited in his native city in 1964 and 1965, together with his first installations, evocations of landscape in which he used stone and brick. During the second half of the decade he concentrated his activity on producing performances, both in Europe and the United States. He also published his first book of poems (Copyright, 1966) and his first novel (2, 15, 1967). In the late sixties he intensified his production of paintings, moving away from the Minimal aesthetics with which he had experimented briefly and focusing on a style connected with elements of landscape and architecture with an aggressive figuration and vehement, vitalist calligraphy in which colour took precedence. The genealogy of this style was traced in the film Dyrehaven –den romantiske skov, which he made in 1970. After lengthy travels in Central America, he increased his iconography with images taken from Mayan art and architecture, which he evoked in his first brick sculpture, made in Jutland in 1973.
After his first exhibition in Germany, at the Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne in 1974, he began framing his paintings in monumental brick fascias. His work gradually adopted an all-over technique, which he presented in the Biennale di Venezia in 1976. He became a teacher at the Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 1978. At the end of the decade he adopted a painting technique close to the Modifications of Asger Jorn, about whom he made a film. His inclusion in various significant group exhibitions in the early eighties –The New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Peinture en Allemagne at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels- gave him an international projection. After Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, he began to model pieces that he subsequently transferred to bronze, drawing inspiration from the technique and expressiveness of Rodin. He used the same technique to make models of his brick constructions, which have adopted a decidedly architectural quality since the late eighties (Bergen, Bielefeld, Valencia)