Per Kirkeby ”Himmel im Garten”. 2003

Oil on canvas. 228 × 202 cm (89 ¾ × 79 ½ in.). Monogrammed, dated and titled on the reverse in green brush: PK 2003 Himmel im Garten. A label from the Essl Collection, Klosterneuburg near Vienna, affixed to the stretcher. Date not covered in the catalogue raisonné by Hejlskov Larsen. [3188] Framed, Oil on canvas. 228 × 202 cm (89 ¾ × 79 ½ in.). Monogrammed, dated and titled on the reverse in green brush: PK 2003 Himmel im Garten. A label from the Essl Collection, Klosterneuburg near Vienna, affixed to the stretcher. Date not covered in the catalogue raisonné by Hejlskov Larsen. [3188] Framed, Collection Essl, Klosterneuburg near Vienna / Private Collection, Dusseldorf, Collection Essl, Klosterneuburg near Vienna / Private Collection, Dusseldorf, Per Kirkeby: Neue Arbeiten. Cologne, Galerie Michael Werner, 2003, ill. / Der Himmel im Garten. Klosterneuburg near Vienna, Essl Museum, 2013/14. Geology of Light: Per Kirkeby and His "Sky in the Garden" Before Per Kirkeby became a painter, he was a geologist. His scientific training therefore shaped his way of looking at the landscape. From 1958 onwards, he took part in several expeditions to Greenland, where he became fascinated by the formation and structure of the Earth’s crust. In 1964, he completed his studies with a doctorate in Arctic geology and began to devote himself to painting. “Geology was so close to an artistic practice that I might just as well have chosen art. It amounted to the same thing,” he noted at the time. He later transformed the geological drawings he had made during his expeditions into works of art. His paintings feature large areas that overlap or interlock, evoking rock formations and scree. Horizontal bands repeatedly hold the compositions together, suggesting the stratification of the Earth. Geologists, after all, think in terms of different timescales, and for Kirkeby painting was almost like a geological process. He took his time, working on several paintings simultaneously, allowing the oil paint to dry slowly and repeatedly painting over existing layers until a sedimentation of strata emerged, much as the Earth and its landscapes have taken shape over long periods of time. At times, as many as twenty large canvases are said to have stood facing the walls in his vast studio in Copenhagen and at his summer residence on the Danish island of Læsø. His aim was not to depict existing landscapes, but to create new ones on the canvas. “Geology is the study of the forces behind forms, both those that break down and those that build up,” he said, referring as much to the study of rocks as to his own art. Kirkeby’s paintings contain no spontaneous or histrionic gestures. His wonderfully vibrant paintings, which grew ever larger and more luminous over the years, draw not only on the primary colours of red, blue and yellow, but also on the many intermediate hues that remain in constant flux, like the colours of nature. We know that the Earth’s tectonic plates shift. Such infinitely slow changes are beyond our direct observation, but Kirkeby succeeded in making the forces of the Earth, the telluric forces, visible in his paintings. In 2000, Per Kirkeby suffered a severe stroke that temporarily altered his perception. Three years later, however, he had regained his full physical and intellectual faculties. During this period of renewed vitality, he painted the large-scale work „Himmel im Garten“ (Sky in the Garden), offered here, a high point in his oeuvre. Never before had he succeeded in bringing light into a painting with such intensity. It is an immaterial light that emanates from within, shimmering through the vegetation, reflected in the water and radiating from luminous areas of colour. Depending on the angle of the light, it flickers across the impasto surface of the painting, making the yellow-orange horizon glow with volcanic intensity. Yet the roughly palette-knifed midnight blue of the sky weighs heavily upon the composition, structured in horizontal bands and dominated by a sombre landscape of forest and rock. In the foreground, the garden, with its foliage in muted shades of green, appears as a place of refuge. Kirkeby found working on his large-scale paintings laborious, for here painting does not come from the wrist alone, but from the entire arm. He loved the idea of being able to enter a painting as one might enter a garden. “You take a little soil from here and carry it over there and plant something. It’s a wonderful feeling. That’s why I painted such large pictures.” The final and tragic turning point came in 2013, when a severe brain injury deprived Kirkeby of his ability to recognise and process colours, spaces and faces. He endured this condition with grim humour. As a geologist, he knew that even granite, once brought to the Earth’s surface, inevitably begins to disintegrate. Ute Diehl

Schätzpreis:€200,000

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