Interview: Achim Borchardt-Hume

What is your background and how long have you been curator at the Tate Modern?

I am an art historian with a Ph.D. on the subject of art and politics in Fascist Italy. Since 2005 I have been Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at Tate Modern where I have curated projects such as Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, the eighth commission in The Unilever Series Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, Rothko: The Late Series, as well as a series of Collection displays.

What significance does this mayor exhibition with Per Kirkeby have for Tate Modern?

Tate has a long-standing commitment to the work of Per Kirkeby. His monumental The Siege of Constantinople (1995) represents a high point in Tate’s Collection of recent painting. In 1998, Kirkeby was commissioned to conceive a large-scale meandering brick structure for the Duveen Galleries at Tate Millbank which was shown together with a selection of paintings and sculptures from the same period. This exhibition builds on these earlier ventures by offering a focused survey of Kirkeby’s forty-year career.

How has the exhibition become a reality and how has the collaboration with Per Kirkeby and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art been?

Kirkeby responded enthusiastically to the exhibition concept and the selection was fine-tuned in close dialogue with the artist. This exhibition is distinct from the wonderful exhibition organised by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of the artist’s 70th birthday. Louisiana is generously lending to Tate’s exhibition.

Per Kirkeby: Gate, 1988. 29,5 x 31 x 18 cm		Per Kirkeby: Model: Gate, 1981. 30 x 29 x 16 cm

The exhibition consists of 146 art works from the last 4 decades of Per Kirkeby’s intriguing career. Can you explain the main ideas behind the curation of the exhibition?

The exhibition offers a focus survey with each of the 11 room concentrating on a key moment and development in Kirkeby’s work. It includes rarely seen drawings and collages from the 1960s, a wide selection of works on masonite, early paintings from the 1970s, small and large-scale sculptures, a group of a large canvases from 1983/4, his extraordinarily colourful work from the 1990s up to a selection of his most recent panoramic canvases. Seen together, these works show that despite their exceptional variety all of Kirkeby’s practice is underpinned by a remarkable consistent intellectual framework that takes reference from art history and popular culture, as much as from nature and science.

Per Kirkeby’s drawings, sculptures, prints, paintings and writing address both aesthetic and existential issues. What does the exhibition wish to address the visitor with during and after seeing the exhibition?

It is important that the work is allowed to speak for itself. Just as the individual works are built up from layers and layers of paint, so their meaning slowly unfolds. The exhibition is designed in such a way that it slows the viewer down. Kirkeby’s work demands time and attention. A short text in each room will provide some context but it is important to remember that as Kirkeby states himself: ‘A picture is not decided by title or explanations’.

Can you highlight 3 important aspects of the exhibition?

This will be the first survey of Kirkeby’s work in the UK. Rather than aiming to be retrospective or to summarize Kirkeby’s work it takes pleasure in the variety of Kirkeby’s work and what at times may appear to be contrasting moods. It includes rarely seen works on paper from the 1960s, as well as a comprehensive selection of his writings and seldomly shown water colours from his journeys to Greenland.

Per Kirkeby: Ohne Titel (Untitled), 1991. 122 x 122 cm Oil and chalk on masonite

How would you characterize Per Kirkeby’s work in the 1960s where he was influenced by minimalism, pop art, Fluxus and the Experimental school in Copenhagen? (Especially in relation to his collaboration with Bjørn Nørgaard and Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, and also his meeting with artists as Robert Morris, beuys, Nam June Palk.)

I am not so sure about the term influence. To my mind, what characterises Kirkeby’s work of the time is his exceptional openness to a great variety of sources. This range from comics such as Tin Tin and film stars such as Jeanne Moureau and Brigitte Bardot to historic painters that were not very fashionable at the time, like Giovanni Segantini and Gustave Moreau. The same applies to the variety of mediums Kirkeby employed at the time including film and performance and his delight in experimentation. It is this mindset which ultimately underpins all his practice, his courage not to stick what he knows but always to explore new terrains.

Per Kirkeby’s background as a geologist unfurls in his working process and his use of the canvas as an ongoing or almost timeless investigation of structure and abstract geometry. Can you elaborate on Per Kirkeby’s working process and how this is visible in the exhibition?

Kirkeby’s paintings are constructed over long periods of time. The bear the traces of countless aesthetic decisions and prolonged viewing enables on to follow this process though there is never a moment of complete resolution. The complexity of this process is what makes his work so strong.

Per Kirkeby has interacted with the Neo-expressionist painters with his dynamic and colourful brushstrokes, illusionism, and modernisation of the European landscape painting. Can you explain Per Kirkeby’s relation to figurative and abstract art?

The polarity between figurative and abstract seems somewhat unhelpful. Every painting is a construct and as such abstract. But many of the paintings retain allusions to the figurative. This dynamic is already visible in the early masonite work where some of the imagery is clearly discernible, while other passages seem purely painterly. Some of the works retain very clear figurative allusion such as Fram which refers to both Caspar David Friedrich’s arctic landscape as well as Dutch still-life paintings. Yet, to put landscape and still-life painting together makes again for a more conceptual rather than straightforwardly figurative gesture.

Per Kirkeby: The Siege of Constantinople, 1995. 400 x 340 cm Oel auf Leinwand

Some of Per Kirkeby’s art strives to interact with the space in which they are placed. How has his paintings and sculptures shaped the exhibition and reshaped the gallery rooms?

Every exhibition is shaped by its spatial parameters and this is no exception. It is constructed in a slightly labyrinthine way to dispel the misguided notion that an artist’s work develops in a linear way. There is a complex network of references within Kirkeby’s own work, the way he uses and re-uses certain motifs, often radically changing them though while doing this. Yet, there is also a basic chronology that should leave the viewer with a fair impression of the extraordinary work Kikreby has produced over the past forty years.

One room is entirely devoted to Per Kirkeby’s extensive writing. Can you explain the importance of displaying his reflections on his own work, others and life in general in the exhibition?

Kirkeby’s writing has developed in tandem to his visual practice. It is important to show how reflective his practice is and how widespread his network of references is from artists such as Rodin and Gauguin to Picasso, Balke and Munch. While a key part of the exhibition is a wall-mounted display of all of Kirkeby’s writings to show its shear breadth, a smaller selection will be available at the end of the exhibition for browsing.

An eternal search, melancholy, vacuity and a religious spirituality is present in Kirkeby’s art work, especially from his grey period in the 1990s. The exhibition displays Per Kirkeby’s artwork but how is the private person Per Kirkeby represented?

This exhibition is to show Kirkeby’s work. As you state in your question, then there is the private person but he is just that, private.

Per Kirkeby: Wald-Variation I, 1989. 200 x 130 cm Oil on canvas

Can you name some new artists in the Tate collection which have been inspired by Per Kirkeby?

There are a great many other recent painters included in Tate’s Collection. And there are a great many interesting young painters coming out of Denmark at the moment. While Kirkeby’s name looms large in the history of recent Danish art and painting, I am not sure though how helpful it would be to speak of direct influences. Rather, I think it is a case that it would be difficult for younger artists simply to ignore this work.

Last, can you highlight other Danish artists to look out for the next year?

I am not sure in which context. Elmgreen and Dragset are one of the talking points of the Venice Biennale which only opened last week. Tal R., John Korner and Jesper Just are other artists whose work I shall follow.

Thank you.