The late artist Per Kirkeby’s preoccupation with geology is on display in a new exhibition
Geological Messages: Paintings from 1965-2015, the exhibition on show at the Michael Werner Gallery in London, consists of 24 paintings in various mediums by the acclaimed Danish artist Per Kirkeby (1938–2018). Over the years, reviewers have compared the pieces created by Kirkeby—who initially trained as a geologist—with various artistic traditions in order to draw out how he deals with the materialities of light, shadow, substance, and system. But this exhibition asks us to consider Kirkeby’s “decades-long preoccupation with the world as geologically unstable, ductile, and everywhere moving between states of mineral complexity and processes of collapse”.
