Per Kirkeby, who died in his hometown Copenhagen in 2018, is considered the most internationally renowned Danish artist of his generation and one of the most important European contemporary artists. The style of the trained geologist is inimitable. Kirkeby's paintings, which he often starts from the edges, have no real center and negate any hierarchy of pictorial elements. In their creation, the artist rather seems to follow the unpredictable course of his intuition, which allows the composition to grow and emerge like a thought. In his article for the catalog of the exhibition at the Museum Kunst Palast and Tate Modern in 2009/10, Richard Shiff described Kirkeby a "reverse Picasso". Unlike Picasso's analytical Cubism, Kirkeby's paintings do not formally dissect an object and break it down into a multitude of perspectives, but rather write down a thought as if on a blackboard or notepad from the combination of individual elements. The present large-format work in a radiant color scheme that is rare in Kirkeby’s oeuvre, is a wonderful testimony of his creative play with inspirations from nature and atmospherically condensed landscape impressions, which he primarily found in his Nordic homeland. In part, however, Romantic landscape painting also served him as an important source of inspiration. The structures borrowed from nature, such as water, trees, mountains, stones, and caves, do not result in a homogeneous landscape painting. They are rather laid out two-dimensionally according to the principle of all-over painting, thus leaving room for a variety of associations. Kirkeby's paintings demand an absolute devotion to the colorful optical impression, they make us close observers of those unique colored sediments, those dynamically rendered and mutually overlapping sensory impressions and emotional worlds. The geologist Per Kirkeby was an extremely sensitive observer and he expects this exact calmness and devotion from the recipients of his work. [JS]