Coming up: PER KIRKEBY – BRICKS

This autumn, ARKEN opens its largest exhibition in 2023: Per Kirkeby – BRICKS, a spectacular presentation of Per Kirkeby's striking brick sculptures.


13 October 2023 to 24 February 2024

Coming up: PER KIRKEBY – BRICKS

Per Kirkeby. Photo: Courtesy Galleri Susanne Ottesen.

The brick sculptures are central to Per Kirkeby’s (1938-2018) extensive and varied oeuvre. A few years before his death, Kirkeby consented to the posthumous rebuilding of the brick sculptures thus making it possible for ARKEN to exhibit a selection of these impressive and thought-provoking sculptures.

 

Per Kirkeby created the first of more than 150 brick sculptures in 1966, and in 1973 the first large sculpture was constructed in a public space. The exhibition at ARKEN thus marks the 50th anniversary of the construction of Kirkeby’s first monumental brick sculpture. The exhibition includes, among other things, the construction of unrealized brick sculptures that exist only as sketches and architectural drawings.

 

The exhibition is exhibited in ARKEN’s Art Axis; the museum’s 150-metre-long exhibition space, where the brick sculptures will enter into a dialogue with ARKEN’s architecture – staged as a city with the sculptures being constructed before the museum audience and continually activated by the museum and its visitors during the exhibition period. In the adjacent gallery, the museum will be the first art institution to recreate a special brick scenography in bricks created by Per Kirkeby in 1992 for the performance Iphigenia auf Tauris by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Coming up: PER KIRKEBY – BRICKS

Per Kirkeby, 2019. Photo: Joris Cerstiaens

Coming up: PER KIRKEBY – BRICKS

Per Kirkeby. Photo: George Dupin, courtesy Galleri Susanne Ottesen

The exhibition is supported by: 

Coming up: PER KIRKEBY – BRICKS

Exhibitions at ARKEN in 2023 are supported by: 

Coming up: PER KIRKEBY – BRICKS

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS