Per Kirkeby at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard

You might say it has taken Per Kirkeby an entire career to accept his artistic calling. That calling, as this exhibition of a dozen recent paintings made clear, is as a landscape painter, one of the most complex and expressive working today. Despite his insistence that he is a city boy, and that he detests the very concept of landscape, nature has been an element in Kirkeby's work for four decades. But early on, the passages of atmospheric color, roiling gestural energy and occasionally explicit natural forms were overridden by Pop imagery. The Danish painter was usually considered with German contemporaries Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, both more critical and ironic artists. Kirkeby was never preoccupied with big-ticket topics like "representation" or "the end of painting" but rather with painting's relationship to what was around him and within him. The danger of any form of expressionism is bombast (I feel, therefore I paint), and in the 1990s, Kirkeby's work often seemed to fall into this quasi-therapeutic trap. The new paintings make more modest claims yet demonstrate triumphantly that Kirkeby has succeeded in forging a rich abstract language capable of uniting inner and outer experience.

These are profoundly attentive paintings, sensitive to the visual impact and metaphoric suggestiveness of nature, and aware of the vast repertoire of perceptions registered by previous artists--Monet and van Gogh seem to hover nearby. Kirkeby has titled these works "Tropisms," suggesting an involuntary turning toward a stimulus, as plants to light. Their uniform format (all vertical, just over 3 feet high), discrete period of execution (all 2004) and dark consistency further indicate that they arose from a single artistic episode of compelled "turning." Yet for all their apparent seriality, the paintings are by no means repetitive or limited by one formal model. Kirkeby evidently was not above barbarizing them with crude strokes and muddy patches of overpainting when they threatened to become too accessible.

The "Tropisms" imply rather than explicitly figure the natural world. They do so through the visual and metaphoric idea of strata, a compositional approach Kirkeby has been exploring at least since the mid-1990s, and which he employed on a heroic scale in murals for the Geological Museum in Copenhagen (2004). In the smaller paintings, Kirkeby complicates the strata with lattice-like forms, shimmering surfaces of reflected color and--in Tropism 2,3 and 4--vertical thrusts of what seem to be forest imagery. He evokes light with background hints of blue, strong yellows and persistent greens, which only emphasize the encroaching darkness. The horizontal registers and crystalline, faceted forms suggest geologic, emotional and temporal layers. The "Tropisms" articulate time's dual unfolding, across nature's eons and in the painter's lived moments.

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