Visitor Information
This exhibition is now closed.
There is no admission fee to visit The Gallery at Windsor. Exhibition visitors are invited to support The Windsor Charitable Foundation with a suggested donation of $10. This gift is tax-deductible and is designated to support local arts education.
About the Exhibition
In December 2015, The Gallery at Windsor opened Echo of the Light, an exhibition of selected works by celebrated Danish artist Per Kirkeby, co-curated by Olivier Berggruen, writer and art historian, and Kadee Robbins, Director of Michael Werner Gallery, London.
Echo of the Light presented a selection of paintings and monotypes from the past 25 years. The selection, which began with work of the late 1980s and ended with more recent monotypes, highlighted Kirkeby’s continued interest in nature within the context of abstraction and mark making. The paintings on view were composed of a delicate balance of vibrant hues and carefully cast shadows engaging in a complex play of scale and spatial depth. The monotypes, including a body of work made in 2014, were a rarely exhibited medium of the artist’s oeuvre. Each monotype is a unique print, technically executed in a way similar to his paintings, they allowed Kirkeby a freedom and spontaneity in their production.
About the Artist
Originally trained as a geologist, Per Kirkeby is one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated artists. Influenced by his scientific roots as well as the gestural works of the Abstract Expressionists, Kirkeby created expressive, heavily layered paintings, which can resemble geological strata, the Danish landscape, and even the female form. He was born in 1938 in Copenhagen, Denmark and lived and worked there until his death in 2018.
Kirkeby studied geology at the University of Copenhagen, but continued to pursue his art practice, producing paintings, sculpture, films and prints. During the 1960s, Kirkeby’s performance art led him to collaborations with Fluxus artists, including Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman.
Kirkeby, who passed away on May 9, 2018, enjoyed a remarkable career spanning five decades. He developed a unique approach to abstract painting, gradually refining a vocabulary of images and a personal palette derived primarily from observations of the natural world. Kirkeby participated in numerous expeditions to Greenland and the Arctic that provided an important visual foundation for his future practice, especially in the case of his painting, which he often described as an ongoing “process of sedimentation.”
Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, among others.
Publication
Per Kirkeby
Echo of the Light
ISBN 978-3-86335-863-1, hardcover with jacket, 48 pages with 18 full-color illustrations. Published by Windsor Press in association with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, Cologne.
Overview
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, Per Kirkeby: Echo of the Light presents a selection of paintings and monotypes by the internationally acclaimed Danish artist from the past twenty-five years. This selection, which begins with work from the late 1980s and ends with his latest monotypes, highlights Kirkeby’s continued interest in nature within the context of abstraction and mark making. The paintings on view are composed of a delicate balance of vibrant hues and carefully cast shadows engaging in a complex play of scale and spatial depth. They broaden seemingly figurative, natural forms into something expansively atmospheric, like abstract memories of landscape motifs. The monotypes, including a body of work made last year, are a rarely-exhibited medium of the artist’s oeuvre. Each monotype is a unique print: technically executed in a way similar to his paintings, they allow Kirkeby a freedom and spontaneity in their production.
This publication also features a selection of essays and poetry that further explores both figurative and abstract ideas of history and evolution in this artist’s oeuvre.