Held in the same private collection since 1968, Bjerget (Mountain) (1967) is a rare large-scale early work by Per Kirkeby. Upon a square masonite panel, Kirkeby depicts a dramatic mountain peak. One face is lit up in brusque strokes of white enamel, while the other is thrown into deep crimson shadow. As is common to works of this period, Kirkeby has used a mass-produced panel of standard 122 x 122cm format, and makes plain the construction of the picture: raw hardboard is visible beneath the liquid washes of pigment, as well as sketched outlines and under-painted touches of blue, ochre and grey. Five pointed silhouettes in flat yellow punctuate the foreground, as if placing the viewer behind a row of fenceposts. This motif relates the work closely to the large ‘fence paintings’ which Kirkeby debuted in The Nordic Youth Biennial for Visual Art at The Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, in December 1966, and are among the most celebrated of his early oeuvre. While his paintings of later decades would become more abstract—capturing a tectonic, elemental sense of environmental dynamics in their surfaces—works like Bjerget (Mountain) display the same fundamental interests in how a picture is made, and in how man situates himself in relation to landscape. The device of the fence, which creates a pictorial flux between near and far, can be seen to inform Kirkeby’s inventive later work with sculpture, installation, architecture and set design; the mountain itself reveals an artist in awe at the splendour of the natural world.
Born in Denmark, Kirkeby was in some ways a successor to Northern European Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich: painters who saw nature in its sublime aspect, depicting dark forests, vast crags and mighty seas overwhelming human onlookers with their power. Fascinated by the forces that move the earth, he had initially trained as a geologist, his studies taking him to Greenland, Central America and the Arctic. By the time he completed his master’s degree in arctic geology at the University of Copenhagen in 1964, he had already been involved with Copenhagen’s avant-garde Eks-skolen, or Experimental Art School, for two years. Drawing inspiration from the Fluxus movement and artists such as Joseph Beuys, he created graphic artworks, paintings, 8-millimetre video works and performances during this formative period, as well as numerous works on masonite. These paintings set out the landscape-based vocabulary that would go on to define his practice; foregrounding the practicalities of their making, they also allowed Kirkeby to explore and develop Post-Impressionist ideas of pictorial structure, which he saw as indivisible from the external world. ‘The picture, too, is nature’, he later explained. ‘The forces that pile up in Mont Sainte-Victoire are no different from those that organise [Cézanne’s] picture. Perhaps this is why his last pictures are built up like a hewn stone wall’ (P. Kirkeby, Håndbog, Borgen 1991, p. 150). Bjerget (Mountain), with its vivid deconstruction of scenery and surface, stakes out a vision that would eventually take Kirkeby to near-metaphysical frontiers.