cover image Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture

Per Kirkeby: Paintings and Sculpture

Dorothy Kosinski and Klaus Ottmann. Yale Univ., $40 (144p) ISBN 978-0-300-18122-7

Published in association with the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., this well-wrought introduction to the Danish painter and sculptor (b. 1938) affords sound passage into Kirkeby’s stirring but often oblique world, where, as the artist has declared, “a picture without intellectual superstructure is nothing.” The foreword by Ottmann, Phillips Collection curator-at-large, skillfully assesses Kirkeby’s career since the 1960s, examining links to natural history, geology, and Wittgenstein’s “logic-grounded philosophy.” The interview with Kirkeby by Phillips Collection director Kosinski explores key ideas, the role that art history plays in his work, and the “resistant” quality of his paintings. In addition, the book includes 52 plate images of paintings and sculptures—paintings that elicit from under their dense structures a dormant heat and force, such as “Inferno V” and “Absalon,” and stoic bronze sculptures that take after Auguste Rodin, such as the formidable “Laeso-Kopf I.” Kirkeby is also an art historian, writer, poet, filmmaker, and geologist. Born in Copenhagen, he drifted with the aesthetic, conceptual currents of his day—pop art, minimalism, and fluxus—yet his most significant contribution, Ottmann argues, is pulling from his background as a geologist to fuse “landscape painting and history painting” into “natural history painting.” It’s work that confounds expectations, bound in an introduction that often exceeds them. 52 color illus. (Nov.)