“I don’t want to be infected with this respectable and immaculate image of a painter from nature....The “landscape” is becoming an idyllic genre that evades the complications of modern life. I, however, am a modern painter. I paint pictures, not landscapes.”
(Per Kirkeby, Handbuch, Berlin, 1993)

Per Kirkeby’s works and texts reflect his interdisciplinarily trained powers of perception. A holder of doctorates in geology and art, he examines the myth of the beautiful, ideal landscape. Building on the foundation of his decades of experience, complex pictures emerge that neither idealize nature nor attempt to depict it. He incorporates various perspectives and layers them, using the method of fragmentation, over and beside one another. Kirkeby, who commentates his own artistic work, describes the genesis of his pictures as a semi-natural process:
“We are, after all, a part of nature. As far as my paintings are concerned, the work process is also the same. I paint layer upon layer, allow time to pass – a lot of time. It is like sedimentation. Then another eruption follows, the way volcanoes develop in the natural world. It’s all a very tedious process that requires a lot of patience. Sometimes I need more than a year for one picture.”
(Süddeutsche Zeitung, Magazin No. 46, 18 November 1994)

The exhibition at the Kunstfoyer focuses on prints done in recent years, especially on those done between 2000 and 2003.