“Art history is better than creativity. It is better to know something about history than to mess around with the all too innocent creative fingers. That is false innocence. But if one knows just a little art history, one also knows the remarkable significance the still-life – the arrangement – plays as a depiction of our culture. Not just the symbolic interpretation of the empty glass, food ready to be eaten… the light snuffed out – and whilst on this; where does the light come from in these pictures; from within? From the snuffed out candle? I believe it is the latter, the echo of the snuffed out light.”

—Per Kirkeby, “On Shadows”

The Danish artist Per Kirkeby first saw the world through a scientist's eyes – as a geologist. In the early 1960s, he participated in what Joseph Beuys called the "expansion of the concept of art" with performance art and films, and it was in this context that he found a connection to the art scene in Germany. He began painting in the wake of pop art through overpaintings that increasingly became more independent works. He made a name for himself in the world of sculpture with monumental structures created using brick, the traditional building material of Northern Europe. Based on his geological knowledge, he developed a structural concept of art in the 1980s, which he then transferred to the formal processes of painting and bronze sculpture. While the German artists of his generation only approached Romantic and Nordic art rather timidly, he was able to modernize these artistic traditions without reservation by drawing on his concept of nature. In his view, the conceptual element completely retreats behind a sensual genesis of form in the sense of natura naturans, which he always derives from the motif. Per Kirkeby lived in Copenhagen and in Italy, and worked as a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main between 1989 and 2000.