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March

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March 2012

MANAMA
CAPITAL
OF
ARAB
CULTURE
2012

Selected works from the
38th Annual Fine Arts Exhibition

RETROSPECTIVE of

PER KIRKEBY

And the "Forbidden

Paintings" of Kurt

Schwitters

Centre for Fine Arts /

Ravenstein circuit

Bruxelles

until 20 May

Per Kirkeby Untitled, 2011
Tempera on canvas 200 x 160 cm Galerie Michael Werner

BRUXELLES. THE CENTRE for Fine Arts presents a retrospective of the work of Per Kirkeby (born in 1938), one of the key painters of

the Danish avant-garde. But just what does avant-garde mean: rupture, minimalism, abstraction, borrowings, subversion? One can

find all of those in a prolific body of work that began in the 1960s in the wake of the Fluxus movement. But that is only one aspect of a

very diverse oeuvre that draws just as much on the figuration of Danish classicism and the experiments of 19th-century French

masters such as Eugène Delacroix. Kirkeby cannot be pigeonholed, nor does he want to be: he prefers to relentlessly question the

position and the perceptions of the observer. An artistic process that has seen him turn to different media (canvas, blackboards,

paper, bronze, etc.) in an assertion of the freedom he finds, as a trained geologist, in the omnipresence of nature. It is in this context

that the Kurt Schwitters room in the exhibition is so relevant. Here, Kirkeby is not confronted with the Dadaist, but with an unfamiliar,

figurative Schwitters, in love with landscape. "Forbidden paintings" - from the point of view of the modernist mainstream, that is. The

Danish artist recognises in this work his own credo: a visceral assertion of his freedom as an artist.