Neid (Envy)

Standing two metres tall, Neid (Envy) (1986) is a poetic vision of the sublime. Acquired the year after its creation, and held in the same private collection ever since, its dynamic swathes of forest green crown a maelstrom of navy blue, together coalescing into a lyrical ballet atop a ground of dusky grey and mauve. Kirkeby, who originally trained as a geologist, sought to channel the world’s elemental forces and, indeed, the painting summons the roil of the natural world, hinting at blustery gales, tumbling leaves, chutes and crystalline streams. Marking the space between nature and representation, Neid draws from Northern European landscape painting and German Romanticism to articulate a land in dramatic, wild colour. Though originally affiliated with Fluxus during the 1960s, Kirkeby’s later paintings look back further to his years studying geology, wherein trips to Greenland, Central America, and the Arctic ultimately inspired his decision to become an artist. The artist’s aesthetic idiom drew from this long-held fascination with the earth’s fluctuations—the slow march of geological time, the impermanence of natural environments, sediment and sky. Less intent on accurately portraying any particular landform, Kirkeby instead sought to capture a terrestrial rhythm. ‘There is a hidden reality and it is the real reality’, Kirkeby once said. ‘We only see it in glimpses. A painter can sometimes see it … and if I paint at all, it is only because I have those glimpses’ (P. Kirkeby, quoted in Per Kirkeby, exh. cat. Galerie Phillipe Guimot, Brussels 1991, p. 64).