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
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.

Per Kirkeby, 2019. Photo: Joris Cerstiaens

Per Kirkeby. Photo: George Dupin, courtesy Galleri Susanne Ottesen
The exhibition is supported by:

Exhibitions at ARKEN in 2023 are supported by:

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

SCREENING: MOVE ME MOVE YOURSELF
Video art is for you too! ARKEN’s new zone for children and young people presents a programme of video art. You can hang out here with friends and family, while the oddest things happen on the screen.
9 February 2023 to 25 February 2024

Eva Steen Christensen - HYDRA
Experience Eva Steen Christensen's sensuous solo exhibition and let yourself be seduced by the stories of the materials.
5 May to 10 September 2023

BUTTERFLY! ARKEN's collection curated by Esben Weile Kjær
Experience the young contemporary artist Esben Weile Kjær's immersive installation with works from ARKEN's collection
10 February to 31 December 2023

REFIK ANADOL - NATURE DREAMS
Digital art has arrived at ARKEN!
10 February to 27 August 2023