Build Your Own Kirkeby Museum!

11 highly different works of art that span both still lifes, landscapes, something resembling a portrait and pure abstractions are in combination one of the highlights of the Live Auction in Copenhagen. The artist behind the art, Per Kirkeby, has never presented a specific plan for the arrangement or order of the works. In other words, they can be displayed and curated as one pleases and believes makes the most sense. As an interactive and playful invitation to reflect on genre, different styles through history, and what it means to curate art – combining and selecting works of art for a viewer – these paintings are drawn together into one great work that can be presented in new combinations over and over again.

The group of works was created in 1974 and is both in format and its wide-ranging style a spectacular piece in Kirkeby's production. Each work is mounted in frames varying between gold and black, which were designed and executed by the artist himself. The work was exhibited in Århus Kunstbygning in 1975, together with works by fellow artists Lene Adler Petersen and Bjørn Nørgaard. Just as these two artists did, Kirkeby also experimented with the concept of art. But where his two colleagues often resorted to activist methods, Kirkeby worked from within the institution itself, the museum, to examine what this institution is and potentially can be aesthetically and historically – and what this does for the visitor.

Ane Hejlskov Larsen, author of the biography "Per Kirkeby", describes the work as "a poetic commentary on the concept of art", and as such it is a study of the museum as a concept. The work was created during a period when Kirkeby moved from the pop art expression of the 1960s to a more personal abstract-spontaneous expression with a great interest in the serial. He created installations that experimented with the exhibition format, including a number of so-called 'museum exhibitions'.