Great Dane

Per Kirkeby
Tate Modern, until 6 September

Last chance to see this intriguing exhibition of paintings and sculptures by one of Denmark’s most original artists. Per Kirkeby (born 1938) is little known in this country, though his work was included in the seminal 1981 survey A New Spirit in Painting, and there were shows at the Whitechapel in 1985 and the Tate in 1998. Back in the Eighties, I was fortunate to know someone who owned a Kirkeby painting, and that first sparked my interest. Now there’s an opportunity to see a large exhibition of his work, laying out the principal areas of his achievement. It’s an impressive experience.

In 1957, Kirkeby went to the University of Copenhagen to study natural history, and his early training as a geologist is fundamental to his subsequent work and obsessions as an artist. In particular it explains his interest in the history and structure of landscape, a relationship brought full circle by a major commission he executed in 2004 for a set of murals for Copenhagen’s Geological Museum. In 1962 he began to be seriously interested in art, and continued his studies in natural history alongside a burgeoning involvement with painting and experimental art such as film and happenings. To begin with, Kirkeby’s art drew sustenance from the revolutionary figures and movements that dominated the international art world of those years, such as Fluxus, Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik. He was nothing if not eclectic.

The Tate’s exhibition starts with a room which offers a taste of mature Kirkeby, in the form of a couple of paintings from the 1980s, ‘Retrospect 1’ and ‘The World’s Northernmost House’. In both, the surface structuring, like loose linear fencing, part obtrudes on and part creates the imagery.