Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg is pleased to announce an exhibition by Danish artist Per Kirkeby drawn from the Hall Collection. Featuring nearly twenty works made between 1972 and 2013, Per Kirkeby: The motif is the memory is installed in the historic Rittersaal and includes several works formerly in the collection of Georg and Elke Baselitz, who resided at Schloss Derneburg for over thirty years. A polymath trained as a geologist, and working between Denmark and Germany, Kirkeby searched for structure within his images. His abstract works in varied media – included here are examples in oil, chalk, found paintings, etchings, and bronze - relied on honed observation and connected his interests in disparate fields through cumulative experience and memory.  

Kirkeby is internationally recognized as one of Denmark’s most famous contemporary artists. Born in 1938 in Copenhagen, his scientific background in geology provided him with a rational skillset before he entered the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen in 1962. His participation in several expeditions to Greenland sharpened his field observations and led him to an interest in the Mayan ruins of Central America. Kirkeby’s lifelong pursuit to find an underlying structure first in nature and then in the visual arts also influenced his work as a writer and poet. An intellectual equally informed by the natural sciences, art history, film, and literature, Kirkeby often wrote measurably and metaphorically: “The motif is the beginning, the provocation and the possibility of correction. The motif is the memory. Without memory one cannot paint a picture.” – Per Kirkeby in Per Kirkeby: Übermalungen, 1964-1984 (München, Der Kunstraum, 1984)

Using black lacquer on Masonite, Kirkeby’s chalkboard series emphasized his interest in hand drawn sketches, as well as the preservation of underlying drawings. In works such as Untitled (1995), Kirkeby’s deceivingly simple form recalls a tree stump, a cavern, the side of a mountain, or the art historical trope of Christ’s descent from the cross, an abstraction that suggests multiple simultaneous readings.

From 1974, Kirkeby was represented by Galerie Michael Werner and subsequently held teaching positions in Germany for over two decades. His introduction to Werner artists and close friendship with Georg Baselitz, AR Penck and Markus Lüpertz directed his interest to the more conventional materials of oil and canvas. Encouraged by his contemporaries, Kirkeby traveled throughout Europe studying the techniques of the Old Masters, in particular painting and printmaking. In the large-scale painting Untitled (1978), which has not been publicly exhibited in over twenty years, Kirkeby demonstrates the influence of Eugène Delacroix’s figural and architectural forms, as well as the compositional choreography of French Romanticism.

Kirkeby is equally well known as a sculptor, having made his first maquettes in bronze in 1981. Influenced by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, Kirkeby’s freely modeled anthropomorphic forms merge geological growth with the study of the figure. Der große Kopf mit Arm (1983), formerly in the Baselitz collection and displayed at Schloss Derneburg during their tenure, is now permanently installed in the museum’s sculpture park. Influenced by a Polaroid Kirkeby took of his wife with her arm raised by her head, the bronze is a melding of the figure and of the base of a tree, underscoring life’s multiple recurring forms.

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018, Copenhagen) joined Eks-skolen (The Experimental Art School), Copenhagen (1962) and graduated from University of Copenhagen, MA, Arctic Geology (1964). He was Professor at Academy of Art, Karlsruhe (1978-89) and Professor at Die Städelschule, Frankfurt (1989-2000). Major solo presentations in recent years include: Per Kirkeby. Evocación de la posteridad, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2023); Bricks: Per Kirkeby, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj (2023); Per Kirkeby – Bronze, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2020); and Per Kirkeby, Kunsthalle Krems (2018). His work is included in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), Copenhagen; and Tate Modern, London, among others.

For more information and images, please contact the Hall Art Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.