BOZAR Presents a Retrospective of Per Kirkeby & Paintings of Kurt Schwitters

Written by Candice Spildtmaling Saturday, 11 February 2012 22:52

Brussels, Belgium - The Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) is proud to present "Per Kirkeby and the Forbidden Paintings of Kurt Schwitters" on view at the museum from February 10th through May 20th. The exhibition is centered on 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 enclave 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.


Per Kirkeby was born in Kopenhagen on 1 October 1938 as the son of an engineer. In 1962 Kirkeby joined the avant-garde art group "Den Ekperimenterende Kunstkole". Per Kirkeby had his first exhibition in Kopenhagen in 1963, his debut as a lyricist followed in 1965. Kirkeby made his first short film "Brigitte Bardot", the first of his 25 films, in 1668, influenced by Andy Warhol's film theory. In 1978 he was appointed professor at the Academy of Arts in Karslruhe, in 1983 he went to the Berlin University of the Arts. Exhibitions like documenta 1972, 1982, 1992 or the Venice Biennale in 1980 and 1982 as well as museums like the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York or the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven showed Kirkeby's work on a regular basis. In the 1980s Kirkeby worked on monolithic brick sculptures. Kirkeby then became a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main in 1988. The artist was also assigned to create eight big bronze sculptures for the German upper house building in 2000.

Kurt Schwitters was born Herman Edward Karl Julius Schwitters on June 20, 1887, in Hannover. He attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hannover from 1908 to 1909 and from 1909 to 1914 studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden. After serving as a draftsman in the military in 1917, Schwitters experimented with Cubist and Expressionist styles. In 1918, he made his first collages and in 1919 invented the term “Merz,” which he was to apply to all his creative activities: poetry as well as collage and constructions. This year also marked the beginning of his friendships with Jean Arp and Raoul Hausmann. Schwitters’s earliest Merzbilder date from 1919, the year of his first exhibition at Der Sturm gallery, Berlin, and the first publication of his writings in the periodical Der Sturm. Schwitters showed at the Société Anonyme in New York in 1920. With Arp, he attended the Kongress der Konstructivisten in Weimar in 1922. There Schwitters met Theo van Doesburg, whose De Stijl principles influenced his work.

Schwitters’s Dada activities included his Merz-Matineen and Merz-Abende at which he presented his poetry. From 1923 to 1932, he published the magazine Merz. About 1923, the artist started to make his first Merzbau, a fantastic structure he built over a number of years; the Merzbau grew to occupy much of his Hannover studio. During this period, he also worked in typography. Schwitters was included in the exhibition Abstrakte und surrealistische Malerei und Plastik at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1929. The artist contributed to the Parisian review Cercle et Carré in 1930. In 1932, he joined the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group and wrote for their organ of the same name. He participated in the Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibitions of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Nazi regime banned Schwitters’s work as “degenerate art” in 1937. This year, the artist fled to Lysaker, Norway, where he constructed a second Merzbau. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Schwitters escaped to Great Britain, where he was interned for over a year. He settled in London following his release, but moved to Little Langdale in the Lake District in 1945. There, helped by a stipend from the Museum of Modern Art, he began work on a third Merzbau in 1947. The project was left unfinished when Schwitters died on January 8, 1948, in Kendal, England.


Playing a key role in the cultural life of Brussels for over 70 years, the Palais des Beaux-Arts (or BOZAR) is a not just a home for art exhibitions, but also a mecca for the city’s music and dance and also the home to the Belgian National Orchestra. The Palais des Beaux-Arts owes its existence to Henri Le Boeuf, a music-loving financier. He commissioned the architect Victor Horta to design a centre that would bring together multiple artistic disciplines under the one roof. Horta’s brief was to design a centre that would house concert halls and exhibition space that would cater for music, theatre, cinema and art. The design had to make art accessible to as many people as possible and in as many different forms as possible, but without compromising on standards. Several challenges were faced by Horta in his design, not least of which was the sloping land he had to work with. The location’s close proximity to the Palais Royale also meant that his building was not to allowed to obstruct the palace’s line of view down to the city. Horta had therefore to look underground to find his space.  It took seven years (from 1922 to 1929) for the art deco complex to be completed, requiring him to alter his plans six times. There are three concert halls: The Henry Le Boeuf Hall seats 2,200 concertgoers and its oval shape is a delight to both the ear and the eye. The 476-seat Chamber Music Room is located under the Great Sculpture Hall. And, there’s the Studio which seats 210. In 1962 the Musee du Cinema was established in the Palais. Apart from its fine archive and exhibition of old cameras and lenses, it also screens classic films. There’s a range of music, expo, theatre and dance events taking place at the Palais des Beaux-Arts daily. Visit the BOZAR Center's website at ... http://www.bozar.be

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