PER KIRKEBY: And the Forbidden Paintings of Kurt Schwitters

BOZAR presents a tribute to Per Kirkeby as a major retrospective of the work of the Danish artist Per Kirkeby.

To mark the Danish presidency of the Council of the European Union, BOZAR EXPO is presenting a retrospective devoted to the contemporary artist Per Kirkeby. The exhibition takes us inside the unique world of his art, to which he has remained true throughout his 40-year career. A world characterised on the one hand by a number of continually recurring themes and on the other by the diversity of the media with which he has experimented. The show will also include a selection of exceptional landscape paintings by Kurt Schwitters, about whom Kirkeby has written a book.

The Centre for Fine Arts presents a retrospective of the work of PerKirkeby (born in 1938), one of the key painters of the Danish avant-garde. But just what does avant-garde mean: rupture, minimalism, abstraction, borrowings, subversion? One can find all of those in a prolific body of work that began in the 1960s in the wake of the Fluxusmovement. But that is only one aspect of a very diverse oeuvre that draws just as much on the figuration of Danish classicism and the experiments of 19th-century French masters such as Eugène Delacroix.Kirkeby cannot be pigeonholed, nor does he want to be: he prefers to relentlessly question the position and the perceptions of the observer. An artistic process that has seen him turn to different media (canvas, blackboards, paper, bronze, etc.) in an assertion of the freedom he finds, as a trained geologist, in the omnipresence of nature. It is in this context that the Kurt Schwitters enclave in the exhibition is so relevant. Here, Kirkeby is not confronted with the Dadaist, but with an unfamiliar, figurative Schwitters, in love with landscape. "Forbidden paintings" – from the point of view of the modernist mainstream, that is. The Danish artist recognises in this work his own credo: a visceral assertion of his freedom as an artist.

Per Kirkeby
And the Forbidden Paintings of Kurt Schwitters
Kurator: Siegfried Gohr