July-August 2010

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As a former geologist who had a brief flirtation with film, Danish artist Per Kirkeby manages to be avant-garde without overly shocking the world. Energy, scientific curiosity and childlike enthusiasm are manifested through wide-sweeping brushstrokes that struggle to be confined to the canvas borders.

Consisting of 10 rooms, the exhibition's initial rooms are anti-climactic after the elaborate description at the entrance. However, the works are comprehensive, ranging from collages to watercolour sketches, bronze sculptures to large-scale oil paintings.

Kirkeby clearly had a diverse background - geology, Experimental Art School, theatre and film, critical writings, exotic travels - which influenced his broad oeuvre. However, not all of his pieces evoke emotion, thought, or even visual pleasure. In some works, such as Untitled 1972-3, the quest for combining compatible hues is devoid of any actual meaning. Instead, it consists of an assortment of pointless cartoon cut-outs pasted onto a yellow canvas with unattractive scribbles to fill in the blanks. Such paintings fall flat and futile, either because of esoteric obscurity that distances the viewer or sheer meaninglessness.

The World's Northernmost House depicts a refuge in which Kirkeby and his fellow explorers took shelter while in Greenland. The painting contains nothing that resembles a shelter, and there appears to be no structure to what is a narrative scene. Through the storm of browns, ochre, blacks, and lavender, interrupted violently by a splash of neon green in the right corner, one is finally able to make out vague shapes that appear to be primitive depictions of figures - circles, happy faces, and crass lines for limbs - and faint, white paint drips that possibly represent rain. Despite it being a fascinating portrayal of a real-life incident, it remains perplexing as a work of art.

On the other hand, as one room opens into another, signalling the different styles that Kirkeby utilised, the paintings begin to be increasingly impressive. Though many of the works in the later rooms still lack lucid meaning or significance, only boasting pretty colour combinations, they do so proudly, and they begin to stand independently as products of experimentation in colour and medium.

In Car Pictures, cars meet polka dots and stencils. This series of four painting-collages depict the interior and exterior of cars in a cacophony of overlapping cliffs and abstract backgrounds. The combination of clean-cut lines and stencilled images with haphazard smears of the brush creates a work that is a hybrid of the styles of Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein and Richter.

Reflecting his spontaneous style, Kirkeby's oeuvre also includes works made with house paints on planks of masonite. Kirkeby thus manages to masterfully integrate the ordinary and everyday with the tradition of Western art, simultaneously referring to and rejecting painting. His approach is subtle, but innovative, and further shows the artist's refusal to be locked down into any one medium.

The later rooms demonstrate Kirkeby's creativity and rigorous experimentation. Most of the large-scale paintings are made by laying un-stretched canvas on the ground and painting from all directions. This technique creates the perplexing effect of eliminating the focal point, a choice that forces the viewer to focus primarily on the cooperation between hues and natural, organic forms.

Many of the artist's works revolve around nature and landscape, an interest that is apparently rooted in his geological studies. However, save for his travel watercolours, his landscapes are not traditional panoramas of delicate trees and impressive boulders; they do not even represent real vistas. Rather, Kirkeby's riverbanks and forests are mashed into blocks of colour, and leaves and trunks are reduced to vibrant, amoebic forms. Untitled 2000, for example, fills an entire wall-sized canvas with large, repeating lilypads of fuschia, yellow, and orange (pictured above). Like his paintings in the initial galleries, this piece contains no intellectual or narrative significance. But unlike them, Untitled 2000 is an understandable, yet inventive, aesthetic exploration of the repetition of shapes, painted in joyful and triumphantly warm hues.

Another work, Soft Lapping of Waves, proves a stark contrast to Monet's docile studies of the same subject. An enormous composition of oblong forms and glaringly brilliant greens on canvas, this painting asserts itself as the most vivid work in the final room. Though the lines delineating the abstracted water are indeed soft and curvy, the title is largely misleading as the loud, but compatible, greens overwhelm the composition. Rather than jarring the viewer, however, the intensity of colour is what actually attracts the eye, and the emerald hues prove captivating.

When I left my eyes had to adjust to the sudden change from the bombardment of colour and flashy collages to the comparatively dull and regular world outside of the gallery. The exhibition seemed to be in rehearsal mode at first, but it ultimately developed into an intriguing grand finale that left a truly colourful impression.

‘Per Kirkeby’ is at Tate Modern, London, until 6 September.

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