Michael Werner Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works on masonite by the Danish artist Per Kirkeby (b. 1938).
Kirkeby has worked in a variety of media throughout his career and is widely acclaimed as a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and writer. In the early Sixties, while studying geology in university, he traveled to the Arctic and Greenland on numerous expeditions. These early fieldwork journeys provided source material for him as an artist and the idea of landscape, sedimentation, and layers has become key elements in his work.
With these recent works on masonite, Kirkeby has continued to create elusive planes of depth and flatness, of shadows and light. The matt black surface of the masonite, similar to a chalkboard, provides an uncommon background material against which Kirkeby applies unusually sparse layers of paint and chalk. Juxtaposing the temporal and permanent nature of these two materials further enhances his on-going and ever-present dialogue between painting, nature and architecture, and color and structure.
Kirkeby has had major retrospectives in Europe and the United States, including the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, the Centre Julio Gonzalez, IVAM, in Valencia, Spain, and the St. Louis Art Museum. In 1996, he won the Coutts Prize and participated in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
The exhibition will be on view from 15 September through 22 October 2005. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10 AM until 6 PM.
A full-color catalog with a text by Theo Kneubühler will accompany the exhibition.
For further information, please contact the gallery.
