Per Kirkeby The Crucial Years

The exhibition The Crucial Years takes us back to Copenhagen in the sixties and seventies, when Per Kirkeby began to experiment and play with painting.

It is the visual story of the renowned painter Per Kirkeby's creation. The exhibition is dedicated to 'the artist Per Kirkeby's production' and the foundation of his imagery - which in retrospective solo exhibitions is often considered to be the story before the "real story" is told.

During the sixties and seventies, Kirkeby formulated his entire ‘vocabulary’ which is seen in the form of; the rock, the forest, the hut and the mountains. Motifs that we can recognize throughout his oeuvre from the eighties to his last works.

In 1961, the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen became known as the Ex-School founded by art historian Troels Andersen and the artist Poul Gernes. The school was a place or more correctly, a community of which the young geology student Kirkeby became a vital and essential part of from 1962 onwards. In his time with the collectively based Ex-School, Kirkeby made countless experiments with form, content and ways of doing and thinking about art. This period is therefore considered extremely important and crucial for the development of the artist we know today. The works we want to exhibit are context-bound and very typical of the period in which they were painted, but at the same time they also point to the painter in spe.

The works in the exhibition will cover works made in the period 1963-77.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with a text from art critic Pernille Albrethsen.

The exhibitions runs from 08.10 - 27.11.21