Per Kirkeby
, Copenhagen — , Copenhagen
Per Kirkeby is best known as the romantic and heroic abstract Nordic painter, yet he created brick sculptures from his first exhibition in 1966 to his final exhibition in 2017 in Paris. The bricks were the backbone of his wider artistic practice, which included painting, drawings and watercolors, bronze sculpture, printmaking, writing, performance, and film work. His brick works create a parallel oeuvre coming into public view now for the first time as a singular and complete body of work in their own right. As one of the great projects that most excited Kirkeby in the last years of his life, this return to the bricks was something that offered him enormous pleasure; his last artworks created in his lifetime were the series of new brick sculptures for his exhibition at Beaux-Arts in 2017.
About Per Kirkeby
Why Bricks? I do not know. But I cannot do it with other materials. I have tried. I lie on the couch for a moment and am back in my childhood. Bricks everywhere. The Grundtvig church and its surroundings. The council housing from the thirties and forties—which for me, still represent the peak of Danish architectural achievement. Train journeys in the summer holidays with a ticket hanging around one’s neck. The brick station buildings. The railway towns… It is the mood, the brick’s load of memories and stories… other gains were color, light, the concentration of the fantastic, organic material… aesthetic aspects of a far too pleasurable character.