Press information
July 2008

Per Kirkeby at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Per Kirkeby is the most important Nordic artist today, and from 2 September 2008 - 25 January 2009 Lousiana Museum of Modern Art celebrates his 70th birthday by painting a new picture of the artist's collected works as a motivically borne, almost methodical oeuvre. The autumn exhibition shows a long succession of formidable and monumental works.

From 2 September 2008 - 25 January 2009 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibits about 100 paintings, 50 sculptures and a number of works in other genres, by Per Kirkeby, the most important Nordic artist today. The aim is to complete the picture of the artist's grand style - and method.

Secret masterpieces

The curator of the exhibition, the Kirkeby expert Erik Tøjner, director of the Louisiana Museum, has quite consistently sought out the masterpieces in Kirkeby's oeuvre, and - perhaps surprisingly - this has often taken him along paths outside the borders of Denmark. For it is a fact that more than three quarters of the works in the exhibition have not been seen before by the Danish public; so in a way it is Kirkeby's secret masterpieces that are now allowed to paint Louisiana's portrait of the greatest Danish post-war artist after Asger Jorn.

A different picture

There is a widespread notion, not least in Denmark, that Per Kirkeby is an expressive painter; that is, that his knack for abstraction, his choice of colours, his sensitivity in the pictures, must necessarily reflect a spontaneous artistic soul who invests his life in the picture as a kind of gesture or bodily activity. This image of the artist appeals to many people because art thus comes to be about physical, emotional life expression - before it is a matter of images borne up by symbols, emblems, motifs and fragments of a recurring narrative. The autumn exhibition sets out to change this myth of the man in favour of a different image of the artist. The picture painted instead presents Kirkeby's work as a motivically borne and almost methodical oeuvre.

The exhibition focuses on Kirkeby's large formats - formidable pictures on the monumental scale - and the works have been drawn from museums and private collectors in among other countries Switzerland, Germany, France, England and the USA.

Further information

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Head of Press Susanne Hartz, tel.: +45 8843 5052, email: press@louisiana.dk
Press photos can be downloaded from http://press.louisiana.dk. A password can be obtained by e-mail or by phone.
www.louisiana.dk.