Per Kirkeby 122 x 122: Paintings on Masonite

Testimony to an artist both searching for a language adequate to his experiences and hunting for experiences that can fill out the available sets and scenery, Per Kirkeby's masonite paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s are rich and many, a strange, flat mix of the provincial and the cosmopolitan--from Brigitte Bardot to the Royal Deer Park in Copenhagen, from minimalistically expressionless stripes to expressive gestures, from grottos and caves full of longing to closed, inapproachable cabins from the western mythology of Hollywood. It is all there, in its own oddly subdued, spatially illusionistic way.