Lot description
Signed, dated and titled 'PER KIRKEBY 1991 Flußlandschaft' verso on canvas. “I see my paintings as a summation of structures. A sedimentation of wafer-thin layers. [...] In principle, an endless accumulation. Yet it is striking that the underlying structure always breaks through, even when a new layer has a completely different motif and a completely different colour." (Per Kirkeby, Beat Wismer, Foreword, Per Kirkeby, exhib.cat. Tate Modern, London a.o., Ostfildern 2009, p.10) “Art - whether it is considered in the process of its creation by the artist or by the viewer, the recipient of the image is in many respects a reflection on this relationship. Theodor W. Adorno expresses this in his characteristically concise and lyrical way: "Nature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it is. To wrest this 'more' from its contingency, to become master of its semblance, to determine it as semblance itself, and thus also to negate it as unreal - this is the idea of art". Adorno thus suggests, among other things, that in a work of art we experience a kind of growth based on almost lifeless premises. This is not as cryptic as it may sound, since reasonable people agree that painting is, in principle, merely an accumulation of material that, for strange reasons, can suddenly give rise to feelings, moods, and visions. And yet hardly anyone experiences a painting as mere matter - not even the painter. If we return to Philip Guston’s previously cited statement on the working process of painting, he also says: "What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it’s craft. That’s what I mean by something grips in a canvas." So it is not at all about the painting erasing its own material traces. Rather, it should make room for more than its materiality - or, put differently, make visible that materiality is not merely dead matter. What Adorno says about nature can therefore be applied just as well to painting: its beauty lies in the fact that it seems to say more than it is.” (Poul Erik Tojner, Per Kirkeby Maleri, Cologne 2003, p.49 ff.)