This beautiful, locally crafted bamboo bicycle appeared in the museum shop today just two days before the opening of our fall exhibition of work by Denmark’s most acclaimed living artist–Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture. Could this new arrival be a harbinger of a Danish-inspired season of cycling at the Phillips?
Bamboo bicycle by Threepenny Bikes, on display in the museum shop. Right: detail of the crankset. Photo: Amy Wike
A retrospective of Danish artist Per Kirkeby’s extensive body of work opened in February at the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels at the heart of its Let’s Dansk! program to mark the Danish EU Presidency.
Over 40 tireless years, Kirkeby has produced a huge body of work. He has mastered expression in painting, sculpture, film, poetry, and other media. With training in both art and arctic geology, thorough knowledge of art history, and familiarity with the philosophy of another renowned Dane–Søren Kirkegaard–Kirkeby is a rare polymath.His artistic range seems only natural given his expertise across disciplines, and his sense of continuity between art, science, and philosophy is embodied in paintings like Inferno V (1992) in The Phillips Collection.
The retrospective in Brussels features more than 180 of Kirkeby’s works–including early Masonite “blackboards,” paintings, architectural models, sculpture, watercolor, and illustration–capturing the shifts and changes in his work as well as pervading thematic links. Kirkeby’s art is complemented by the “forbidden paintings” of Kurt Schwitters–realistic landscapes revealing a range beyond the artist’s typical dadaist style.
The exhibition touches on Kirkeby’s dialogue with art and nature: important and inevitable shifts and changes in material, sensitivity and responsiveness to the surrounding world, and continuity through time. Every shift draws from the past and fuels the future. Retrospective Per Kirkeby and the “Forbidden Paintings” of Kurt Schwitters is on view at BOZAR in Brussels through May 20, 2012. And that’s not all–another Kirkeby exhibit is on view in Germany through May 28 at Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, and the Phillips looks forward to bringing his work to D.C. audiences this fall with Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture, 1964–2010 (Oct. 6, 2012-Jan. 6, 2013).
