KIRKEBY ON THE BRINK - Major Exhibition at the Tate Modern, London

Per Kirkeby is renown as one of Denmark's leading living artists. No surprise then that the English simply don't get him. Kirkeby - born 1938 - has struggled with his painting, sculpture and poetry over the last four decades and although internationally acclaimed (elsewhere) he has never had a major exhibition in the United Kingdom until now - at the Tate Modern no less.

Influenced as he is by his academic background in geology, his flirtation with Pop Art in the 1960's, his naturally dark take on northern European landscapes, and finally filtered with his obvious romantic obsessions with the history of western painting circa 1860-1910, it is easy to see why his scratchy, craggy, dark, vivid and melodramatic "abstract landscapes" jarr with the altogether more bland English palette.

I on the other hand was blown away by a trajectory that has taken in "illustration", and a host of interesting media and techniques, particularly in the 1970s and 1980's (blackboard drawings for one - sculpture relying heavily on Rodin for another), and that always comes back to one recurring theme - a warped view of the landscape.

Indeed, Kirkeby flirts on the brink of disaster, a tension between representation and abstraction, darkness and light, an impending event, or a non-event. This is the excitement of Kirkeby - one never knows what the real point of focus is. What is stranger still is how, from a contemporary pop perspective, his paintings in fact appear to have evolved BACKWARDS in time, in other words, his "THE MURDER IN THE FINNUP BARN" (1967) is of a illustrative technique and sinisterness that would be very contemporary today, whereas "SOFT LAPPING OF WAVES, GREEN" (2005) harks back to the impressionism of Monet and Manet.

Of course Kirkeby was branded a "neo-expressionist" in the 1980's and that is fair enough, yet somehow the continual representations of the hut, the cliff, the branch, the wood grain, the hillock, birds, foxes and so on that haunt his monumental pieces put him into an altogether singular space. The layering of various strata and textures from dislocated vantage points in these same works spanning decades keeps the ghost of Cubism alive, and his vivid colours struggling to excrete themselves from turgid backgrounds are a tribute to Goya and his other obsession, Gaugin.

The show-stopping scale of the larger, more recent works like "FLIGHT INTO EGYPT" and "PORTGULIA" is appropriate for the immersion into pure colour and texture. Perhaps this confidence is a function of success and affordability, but nonetheless they are on target - they mess with your head and heart. Perhaps this unsteadiness, this lack of fixity is what has confounded the British tastemakers for so long. It simply defies labeling.

Per Kirkeby is on at the Tate Modern, London, until 6th Sept. 2009.

Curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Curator, with Cliff Lauson, Assistant Curator.