[[Neo-Expressionism]] [[Landscape]] painter: > In 1997, Paul Levine, then a Copenhagen correspondent for _ARTnews_, visited Per Kirkeby’s studio for a profile in the magazine. Levine asked Kirkeby about the inward-looking nature of his canvases, which tended toward the dark and brooding, often earthy tones piled on top of one another. “In my paintings, you experience a clear sense of space, and at the same time you also feel enclosed,” Kirkeby said. In other words, his canvases were not open expanses of color similar to those favored by the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s. Kirkeby was also wry enough to add, “You want to enter into that space, and you end up knocking your head against the wall. I cannot explain that. I don’t know why that is.” > That sense of ambition tempered by a sense of dry wit carried through much of the work of Kirkeby, who died today at the age of 79. The passing of one of the leading painters of the Neo-Expressionist movement was announced by his longtime gallery, Michael Werner, which has spaces in New York, London, and Märkisch Wilmensdorf, Germany. > Kirkeby rose to notoriety during the early 1980s alongside fellow European Neo-Expressionist artists Markus Lüpertz, A. R. Penck, Jörg Immendorff, and Georg Baselitz, all of whom brought a renewed emphasis on formalism and painterly technique to an art world that had, by then, nearly given up on their medium. Unlike his colleagues, who were mainly active in Germany, Kirkeby was born in Denmark and was, at certain points in his career, based in Copenhagen. He often ascribed a Nordic sensibility to his work, noting that, in comparison to the monumental paintings produced by Baselitz and Lüpertz, his canvases alluded frequently to geological formations and landscapes, as opposed to people and emotional states. ![[Per-KirkebyGetPicture.aspx.gif]]