Per Kirkeby - Bronze

Per Kirkeby
Bronze
21 February 2020 – 21 June 2020

Per Kirkeby – Bronze is the big spring exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The sculptures, small as well as monumental, take the starring roles, and at the same time, in interaction with paintings, drawings and works by among others Rodin and Giacometti, they help to elucidate the development of Kirkeby’s painting. Louisiana director Poul Erik Tøjner has organized the exhibition.

Per Kirkeby (1938-2018) is richly represented and has exhibited at museums all over the world, and is one of the principal figures in the Louisiana’s collection, which features works by the artist from the early beginning until his final years. The exhibition Per Kirkeby – Bronze focuses on the artist’s work with figure and space, things in which he took a lively interest in his painting.

The great majority of exhibitions of Per Kirkeby’s work – including Louisiana’s – have included a small number of the artist’s bronzes. Although rather heavy, they have functioned as a kind of footnotes to the painter Per Kirkeby. This relationship is changed by Louisiana’s coming exhibition. Yet visitors should not expect white galleries populated by black statues, for as always with Kirkeby, the individual work is interwoven in a larger narrative, into his whole oeuvre.

Not rarely, the sculpture looks as if it has been painted forth Although Kirkeby worked in many genres alongside painting, there is no doubt that he saw himself as a painter. He even accepted the term ‘painter’s sculpture’ used by a German art historian to characterize the kind of sculptural art that has a clear relationship with painting. And this is what Kirkeby’s sculptures have in several ways. One of the obvious ones is the way he administers the surface of the sculptures. Not rarely the sculpture looks more as if it has been painted forth than actually sculpted.

In Kirkeby’s case the emergence of sculpture in his work at the beginning of the 1980s was of quite crucial importance to the development of his painting. Thanks to generous loans, the exhibition will include many of Kirkeby’s sculptures, including works that we are not used to seeing, at some points in an interplay with particular paintings and drawings, and in several cases with a view to the elective affinities in the history of art that were so typical of the intellectual scope of the artist’s gaze at the world.

Curator: The exhibition has been curated by Louisiana’s director Poul Erik Tøjner.

Catalogue: In connection with the exhibition a catalogue in Danish and English is being published.