I Want to Be There

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Sarah Osborne Bender

I saw Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves when it was released in theaters in 1996. Even though it featured stellar acting and was filled to the brim with gut-wrenching drama, what I remember most are the transporting bits of film used as chapter stops. Imagine my delight when I learned that Per Kirkeby is responsible for them. It wasn’t his first, or last, foray in to film. We’re featuring his 1970 film Deer Garden: The Romantic Forest in our current exhibition. He’s also worked with von Trier on Dancer in the Dark (which we are screening in December, along with Breaking the Waves) and Antichrist.

In Breaking the Waves, the story is presented in chapters, like a novel, and each is introduced with chapter number and name during an interlude of a landscape backed by a 1970s pop song. The views are spectacular. The one for chapter two has stayed with me most, and I’ve often daydreamed of being there, where ever that is. I had never thought to look up Kirkeby’s titles online to see if they had been captured on their own, and of course they have been. The image quality in the YouTube versions isn’t as beautiful as watching the movie in the theater, but you can still see the incredible shifting northern European light and lush land. On the big screen, they are enveloping. Watching them now after becoming better acquainted with Kirkeby’s painting, I certainly see the resonance. The lovely scene for the epilogue of a creek rushing under the arch of a stone bridge can’t help but bring to mind his painting Dark Cave (The Dream about Uxmal and the Unknown Grottos of Yucatan) (1967).

Chatting with Per Kirkeby

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Experiment Station

In this video, exhibition co-curator Klaus Ottmann seizes a rare opportunity to talk with the usually reticent Danish artist Per Kirkeby about his work while his exhibition at the Phillips is being installed.

I Didn’t Catch Your Name . . .

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Experiment Station

We had all been talking about Per Kirkeby for a few years before we were surprised to learn that our pronunciation of his last name was off. Way off. Ann Greer, director of communications and marketing, and Cecilia Wichmann, publicity and marketing manager, paid a visit to the Danish Embassy and were helpfully instructed on the correct pronunciation; quite different from the way a speaker of American English would approach the name. At a planning meeting in the spring, Ann shared the pronunciation with us and the meeting quickly devolved to a room full of people making unusual sounds and faces, trying to train our mouths to cooperate with Danish. We’ve even included a phonetic spelling in our press materials. Have you got the sound right?

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