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Lot Essay
Spanning two metres in height, Die Zeit Nagt III (The Time Gnaws III) is a vivid example of Per Kirkeby’s rich painterly language. Deep hues of green, blue and gold cascade down the picture, rendered with thick, expressive strokes of impasto. Painted in 1992 – the year that the artist exhibited his monumental Raumskulptur at Documenta IX – it is the last in a series of three works whose title invokes the ‘gnawing’ or ravages of time. Originally a student of geology, Kirkeby was fascinated by the rhythms and contours of his native Danish landscape, and sought to channel them into his work. Concepts of erosion, landslide and other natural processes played into his painterly language, informed by his engagement with the legacy of Northern European Romanticism, Post-Impressionism, and Abstract Expressionism. ‘The picture, too, is nature’, he explained. ‘The forces that pile up in [Cézanne’s] Mont Sainte-Victoire are no different from those that organise the picture. Perhaps this is why his last pictures are built up like a hewn stone wall’ (P. Kirkeby, Håndbog, Borgen 1991, p. 150). This thinking finds eloquent expression here, where paint accumulates like layers of sediment, riddled with fissures and slippages.
Though typically associated with German Neo-Expressionist painters such as Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff, Kirkeby’s practice was truly interdisciplinary. Following his geological studies, which took him to Greenland, Central America and the Arctic, he became involved with Copenhagen’s Experimental Art School in the early 1960s, drawing inspiration from the Fluxus movement and artists such as Joseph Beuys. Over the following years, he would pursue media ranging from writing and performance to sculpture, installation and set design. In the 1990s he began working with the Danish film director Lars Von Trier, designing visual effects for three films including Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Antichrist (2009). Despite the impassioned, evocative surfaces of his canvases, Kirkeby maintained a fundamentally conceptual stance, insisting that his works were less representations of his homeland than attempts to give form to the dynamic forces of nature. ‘My canvas is the plot of land and my colours – that is, the matter of paint itself – are the soil … with their different components and varying textures’ (P. Kirkeby, quoted at https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/per-kirkeby-pioneering-neo-expressionist-painter-dies-79-10303/). In the present work, Kirkeby pays tribute to the inevitable march of time, conjuring the invisible forces that slowly make their mark upon the landscape.
Though typically associated with German Neo-Expressionist painters such as Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff, Kirkeby’s practice was truly interdisciplinary. Following his geological studies, which took him to Greenland, Central America and the Arctic, he became involved with Copenhagen’s Experimental Art School in the early 1960s, drawing inspiration from the Fluxus movement and artists such as Joseph Beuys. Over the following years, he would pursue media ranging from writing and performance to sculpture, installation and set design. In the 1990s he began working with the Danish film director Lars Von Trier, designing visual effects for three films including Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Antichrist (2009). Despite the impassioned, evocative surfaces of his canvases, Kirkeby maintained a fundamentally conceptual stance, insisting that his works were less representations of his homeland than attempts to give form to the dynamic forces of nature. ‘My canvas is the plot of land and my colours – that is, the matter of paint itself – are the soil … with their different components and varying textures’ (P. Kirkeby, quoted at https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/per-kirkeby-pioneering-neo-expressionist-painter-dies-79-10303/). In the present work, Kirkeby pays tribute to the inevitable march of time, conjuring the invisible forces that slowly make their mark upon the landscape.