"Per Kirkeby"
Tema Celeste, Milan, Summer 1992, p.80
Exhibitions that are entirely planned by artists at the height of their powers, revealing a subjective retrospective take on their own work, often turn out to be key shows for such artists. This was certainly the case with Per Kirkeby's one-man show at the "Magasin" in Grenoble. This Germanstyle Kunsthalle, situated in an old building designed by Gustave Eiffel, offers a huge exhibition space, including an "outdoor" structure and a more museum-like area that is enclosed, but extremely versatile. Kirkeby pounced on this opportunity not only to fill and organize these large premises just as he pleased, but also to re-address an old project. This project involved arranging all the various aspects of his recent work around early pictures, produced by an outlaw Kirkeby working in Danish isolation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As such, he violated the virtual ban on practicing the traditional craft of a painter standing at his canvas. This ban was promulgated, in particular, in the very circles from which Kirkeby hailed - the milieu of Fluxus and "Intermedia."
The "Magasin" show was thus an interesting mustering of every aspect of Kirkeby's current work: four architectural brick sculptures; models of architectural sculptures; sculptures fullstop, cannily displayed on just two pedestals; and a monumental sculpture, again taking up his interest in Rodin and Rouault. The show also included five groups of pictorial works, recent freehand drawings, recent monumental canvases, recent monu -mental drawings, and paintings or black panels, all with the same rectangular format. The show's high point, however, was a series of approximately one hundred rarely shown paintings produced in the late '60s and early '70s. In these works the use of industrial wood panels, where the painted form is immediately obliterated by the impervious surface, paved the way towards Kirkeby's mature, liberated pictorial style.
The success of the statement intended by the exhibition relied on the fact that this rarely seen series of works illustrates the point of departure of what might be called the "diagram" or stroke peculiar to Kirkeby. But it also resided in the fact that this very purpose culminated in another statement - the continuity between Kirkeby's pictorial and sculptural work and its roots in the Fluxus movement. It is on the basis of a particularly
Fluxus-inspired gesture - the obliteration of a painting - that Kirkeby finally, and ground-breakingly, took things to their logical conclusion, and
formulated the work with which we are now familiar.
Robert Fleck
Translated from the French by S. Pleasance At the Magasin, Grenoble