Per Kirkeby: Natures Mortes

Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills is pleased to present 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 Per Kirkeby’s international reputation grew, he encountered an artistic crisis and turned to the tradition of historic Northern European painting as a way forward. In 1983, he created a monumental masterpiece titled Fram, now in the collection of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The work was inspired by the accounts of Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) and his iconic ship named Fram, which translates to “forward” or “advance” in Nordic languages. In the painting, Kirkeby combines compositional elements from two famous Northern European works: Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823–24) and a 17th-century Dutch still life by Willem Claesz Heda.

Kirkeby described Caspar David Friedrich as “the perfect painter of theatrical scenery. The whole picture is divided up into decorations in very close proximity and very close to the backcloth: the sky, the mountains, the rainbow, the mist. Each plane completely unfolded in terms of the feel of the color. There is so little room in the world. The horizon is close, not far away. The world is not very big. You can contain it in its entirety inside your head.” Kirkeby’s description of the formal qualities of Friedrich’s paintings is strikingly similar to Dutch still life painting, in which objects are close to the foreground and immense religious and philosophical themes are conveyed through inanimate items.

Reliance on motifs garnered from the history of Northern European helped Kirkeby navigate his artistic crisis in 1980s and defined his art in the ensuing decades. In 1986, American critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Kirkeby “makes a whole art, an art authentic to the little world it comes from and equal to the big world it enters.”

Per Kirkeby: Natures Mortes includes paintings from 2005 to 2012 that combine Caspar David Friedrich’s theatrical scenery, fields of color, and close horizon line with distinctive motifs derived from Willem Claesz Heda’s still life painting. The paintings are complemented by two monumental bronze sculptures by Per Kirkeby.

Works by Per Kirkeby are found in museum collections worldwide including Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. Important solo museum exhibitions include Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum Jorn, Silkeborg; the Beaux-Arts de Paris; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Tate Modern, London; IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. In 2023, two important exhibitions of Kirkeby’s works were held at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.