Per Kirkeby & Chris Succo
Achenbach Hagemeier, Berlin
Wedding | Berlin | GermanyAchenbach Hagemeier is pleased to present Succo / Kirkeby - a duo-exhibition taking place in Berlin and Düsseldorf bringing together landscape and geology by Per Kirkeby (1938 - 2018) with abstract expression and dissolved figuration by Chris Succo (b. 1979). Layering and colour meet lines and monochromy. In the refracted light of the painted image, we meet two masters of materiality and colour in their boundless creative potential. As an academic and field geologist, Per Kirkeby is firmly grounded in the natural sciences; and yet he is a Danish artist who moved on from happenings and conceptual art to painting and sculpture. Influenced by the early ban on painting, he followed Jörg Immendorff’s painted injunction to stop painting (Hört auf zu malen, 1966) and soon began to call for a disciplined form of wildness. His own atmospheric set of motifs appears on several works on masonite.
Here we can study nature or, more often than not, sense it. Per Kirkeby holds the world’s existence in his palette; an immense time span, millions of years of Earth’s history, of sediments and erosion lie concealed in his gradations, hatching, and layering. Kirkeby blends the scientist’s sober scrutiny with the artist’s sensitive gaze. Naturalism and abstraction coalesce in uncommon ways, spatiality is lost, time and again, in the free play of colours and shapes. Ultimately his painting has an immediacy that, while derived from distance to nature, overcomes this distance through art. Kirkeby’s six works on canvas on display in the exhibition have a fascinating effect in that they seduce or tempt – first the artist, then our brain – to walk into these landscapes, the autumnal scenery of trees and bushes, reflections on water, and rocks, to experience and perceive them wholly, completely, ecstatically. A trick of the eyes, we soon find, for the offerings of his agitated realism swiftly fade in the course of their symbolic attribution. Understanding here means abstract world view, and vice versa.
Succo’s painterly practice is reminiscent of lyrical abstraction in that its explorations and its web of materials, composition, and line blur the history of painting to which it pays homage. Yet it is remarkably difficult to say what is really central to it. On the one hand, there is a materiality taken to extremes of contrast between line and surface. Using thick oil crayons or his hands and fingers he applies paint straight to the canvas. Ultimately his painting has an immediacy that, while derived from distance to the brush, overcomes indirectness. With Kirkeby, unmediated nature appears in colour and form; with Succo, an unmediated nexus links head and hand, with no brush intervening. While Succo’s large formats use different styles and media, they share an emphasis on monochromy. In the spirit of abstract expressionism, the swift strokes and gestural curvatures of his paintings celebrate the boundless potential of colour and canvas.
On the other hand, there is a sense of figuration that permits open allusions to the world of things outside of the picture but articulates these as interventions in the fabric and annuls them, unites them within itself and finally returns them to the light of the surface in purely abstract form. It is precisely these contradictions in the composition which lend his works a harmonising tension. The lines of his drawings occasionally anticipate the structure of the fabric, and once the painting is in progress, it seeks stability in the line. The thick paint, applied directly by hand, stands out strongly on the underlying fabric and in its delicate weave. In the six paintings on display here, too, thick and dense patterns produce and conceal the figurations, interiors, or settings which with him manifest themselves as small entities, transient moments of a different reality of life. These keep Chris Succo’s spirit and perception on the alert, and he lets us share in this experience, as if they were splinters of a blurred memory which he is at this very moment recalling to his mind, to action, and to a new arrangement for us on the playing board of constellations.
Finally, let these two painters bring their twelve paintings together in an exhibition of startling appeal. The confrontation or juxtaposition of the paintings Per Kirkeby made over a period of more than forty years with Chris Succo’s most recent productions sheds a clear light on the different poles of painterly concepts. More than that, the dialogue of materialities –geological landscape with Kirkeby, abstract mind-mapping mesh with Succo – is fascinating in its syntactic and semantic manifestations. We sense the proximity to nature and culture, to places and people. In the degree of abstraction, however, we sense precisely that distance which necessarily arises when the medium is transformed and questioned over the course of time. Painting and world, colour and form, time and present: all this has firmly settled in the realm of memory and awakening. The unusual display and combination give us a fresh view of the two painters and allow us to appreciate them as explorers and archaeologists of the visual sediments of our world.
Achenbach Hagemeier is pleased to present Succo / Kirkeby - a duo-exhibition taking place in Berlin and Düsseldorf bringing together landscape and geology by Per Kirkeby (1938 - 2018) with abstract expression and dissolved figuration by Chris Succo (b. 1979). Layering and colour meet lines and monochromy. In the refracted light of the painted image, we meet two masters of materiality and colour in their boundless creative potential. As an academic and field geologist, Per Kirkeby is firmly grounded in the natural sciences; and yet he is a Danish artist who moved on from happenings and conceptual art to painting and sculpture. Influenced by the early ban on painting, he followed Jörg Immendorff’s painted injunction to stop painting (Hört auf zu malen, 1966) and soon began to call for a disciplined form of wildness. His own atmospheric set of motifs appears on several works on masonite.
Here we can study nature or, more often than not, sense it. Per Kirkeby holds the world’s existence in his palette; an immense time span, millions of years of Earth’s history, of sediments and erosion lie concealed in his gradations, hatching, and layering. Kirkeby blends the scientist’s sober scrutiny with the artist’s sensitive gaze. Naturalism and abstraction coalesce in uncommon ways, spatiality is lost, time and again, in the free play of colours and shapes. Ultimately his painting has an immediacy that, while derived from distance to nature, overcomes this distance through art. Kirkeby’s six works on canvas on display in the exhibition have a fascinating effect in that they seduce or tempt – first the artist, then our brain – to walk into these landscapes, the autumnal scenery of trees and bushes, reflections on water, and rocks, to experience and perceive them wholly, completely, ecstatically. A trick of the eyes, we soon find, for the offerings of his agitated realism swiftly fade in the course of their symbolic attribution. Understanding here means abstract world view, and vice versa.
Succo’s painterly practice is reminiscent of lyrical abstraction in that its explorations and its web of materials, composition, and line blur the history of painting to which it pays homage. Yet it is remarkably difficult to say what is really central to it. On the one hand, there is a materiality taken to extremes of contrast between line and surface. Using thick oil crayons or his hands and fingers he applies paint straight to the canvas. Ultimately his painting has an immediacy that, while derived from distance to the brush, overcomes indirectness. With Kirkeby, unmediated nature appears in colour and form; with Succo, an unmediated nexus links head and hand, with no brush intervening. While Succo’s large formats use different styles and media, they share an emphasis on monochromy. In the spirit of abstract expressionism, the swift strokes and gestural curvatures of his paintings celebrate the boundless potential of colour and canvas.
On the other hand, there is a sense of figuration that permits open allusions to the world of things outside of the picture but articulates these as interventions in the fabric and annuls them, unites them within itself and finally returns them to the light of the surface in purely abstract form. It is precisely these contradictions in the composition which lend his works a harmonising tension. The lines of his drawings occasionally anticipate the structure of the fabric, and once the painting is in progress, it seeks stability in the line. The thick paint, applied directly by hand, stands out strongly on the underlying fabric and in its delicate weave. In the six paintings on display here, too, thick and dense patterns produce and conceal the figurations, interiors, or settings which with him manifest themselves as small entities, transient moments of a different reality of life. These keep Chris Succo’s spirit and perception on the alert, and he lets us share in this experience, as if they were splinters of a blurred memory which he is at this very moment recalling to his mind, to action, and to a new arrangement for us on the playing board of constellations.
Finally, let these two painters bring their twelve paintings together in an exhibition of startling appeal. The confrontation or juxtaposition of the paintings Per Kirkeby made over a period of more than forty years with Chris Succo’s most recent productions sheds a clear light on the different poles of painterly concepts. More than that, the dialogue of materialities –geological landscape with Kirkeby, abstract mind-mapping mesh with Succo – is fascinating in its syntactic and semantic manifestations. We sense the proximity to nature and culture, to places and people. In the degree of abstraction, however, we sense precisely that distance which necessarily arises when the medium is transformed and questioned over the course of time. Painting and world, colour and form, time and present: all this has firmly settled in the realm of memory and awakening. The unusual display and combination give us a fresh view of the two painters and allow us to appreciate them as explorers and archaeologists of the visual sediments of our world.
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