Jeppe Curth: 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Collector's Edge for Nordic Art Partners. In today's episode, we're gonna dive into the career, legacy, and market of Pierre Kirkabu, one of the most important Scandinavian painters of post-war period and a very respected figure in European art history. With me in the studio is our art expert, Nicolas Robison. I'm your host, Jeppe Curth. Let's get started.

Speaker: 0:30

And the piece is sold.

Nicholas Robinson: 0:34

We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news. Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself? And how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is The Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered, thoughtful, and well informed in your choices and actions. Welcome to the Art of Collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value.

Jeppe Curth: 1:30

Hi Nick.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:31

Hi, J eppe.. Doing well? Yes, it's a new year, and we are up and running. Yeah, we are.

Jeppe Curth: 1:40

So let's jump to it. Today we're gonna talk about Per Kirkeby.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:46

We are going to talk about Peer Kirkibi. I will be saying Danish words to you, a Danish person, so you will have to bear with me today.

Jeppe Curth: 1:54

I will. Normally you bear with me, I guess.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:57

Yes, that's true.

Jeppe Curth: 1:58

So um but as always, let's start from the beginning. Who is Per Kirkeby?

Nicholas Robinson: 2:02

Well, Per Kirkeby is a very prominent Danish artist and probably considered the foremost modernist of uh this country. I would say alongside or perhaps after Wilhelm Hamashoi and Asgar Jorn is perhaps the best known Danish artist internationally. Would you agree with that?

Jeppe Curth: 2:25

Yeah. In current you see him in all the fairs as well, so but everybody knows Per Kirkeby when we talk about it.

Nicholas Robinson: 2:31

But more or less so than the other two sort of major figures I mentioned? Um, I would say so.

Jeppe Curth: 2:39

I would say so, yeah. But yeah, one of one of the three.

Nicholas Robinson: 2:42

Yeah. Okay. Well, if we if we have a a a quick synopsis of his bio, we can we can delve into his work after. He was born in 1938. Uh as a son of an engineer, and I was born on the outskirts of Copenhagen, living in a district called uh Bisperbia, which is an area, a neighborhood in the north of the city, up on a high point, the high point of which is dominated by a structure that many of our Danish listeners will no doubt be familiar with, a building called Gruntvigskirche, Kuntvigskurch, which is actually my favourite building in Denmark, and an extraordinary example of expressionism in 20th century architecture is basically a brick built modernist cathedral, or cath church but cathedral in scale, and it has sort of zigorats on the roof in slight imitation of a sort of a Flemish or interpretation of a Flemish gable. The whole thing is constructed from yellow bricks, and when I say the whole thing, I mean the walls, the buttresses, the spire, the floor inside. I mean it's just a total environment constructed from these bricks, and it's it's absolutely exquisite. It's a really, really beautiful, uplifting building, and this was dominating the skyline and the environment in a very physical way where he grew up. And we can you know we can revisit that later because this structure had a had an important influence on his working life and his sense of aesthetics. In in 1957, he enrolled at the University of Copenhagen, where he studied natural history. And in the course of his studies, or as a in the course of his work as a research assistant there, he went on to make several trips to Greenland, particularly in 58, 59, 1960, and his primary interest on these trips was in geology. And of course, anyone with even a passing knowledge or interest in Kigubi's work will know that many of these aspects of the natural world became completely fundamental to his work. So during these trips, during which he was studying the manner in which the land had formed, layers upon layers of matter laid down and then removed over millions of years, this left a profound impression upon him and was the the sort of the key, the foundational sort of precepts for his key principles, namely sedimentation or the accumulation of layers, and erosion, meaning of course the removal of layers. So that was his sort of seminal experience of being in nature that informed his subsequent artistic vision. In 1962, however, he gave up his burgeoning career as a field geologist and he began studying at something called the experimental art school in Copenhagen, which was which was sort of nicknamed Ex Skolen. And working there, he was involved in a variety of media practices, including, but not limited to painting, also the graphic arts. He was involved making 8mm films and some performance pieces. And this this environment, uh this place had a sort of fluxus-inspired anarchy, and it was a an it was an institution that enabled young student artists to engage not only with experimentation and new technologies, but also other like-minded artists, and was an environment that was sort of quite tapped into various prevailing movements, ideas in modern art around the world. So whilst he was here, he he's he's in an environment where, of course, the key thing is is very much challenging the notion of what art could be, but at heart Kierkabee was and was to always remain a painter. So even though he went on to work as a sculptor and a writer and a filmmaker, I guess he always perhaps predominantly identified himself as as a painter. In his adult life, he lived between Helleup in just outside Copenhagen, Frankfurt in Germany, and Italy, and since the late 1970s he spent a lot of time on the island of Lessu, where he had a house and a studio and worked a great deal there.

Jeppe Curth: 7:18

Often I would say Kirkepu is associated with the neo-expressionism.

Nicholas Robinson: 7:23

Yes, absolutely.

Jeppe Curth: 7:25

Yet when I look at his painting, his works feel structurally different for many of his peers. How how how can you try to place him within this post-war European painting period?

Nicholas Robinson: 7:39

Yes, of course. I mean uh you're right to identify this sort of key characteristic of his paintings. They are very structured and maybe a little less fluid in some ways than some of the more expressive abstraction that you're talking about. But if we if we look into the development of his work and the bodies of work, we can see how the various themes and ideas are evolving in his practice. So we've understood that he was at art school in the early 1960s. Now, of course, the 1960s across the world was a time of tremendous sort of upheaval culturally and in a societal way as well. And his early works from the 1960s, they show a strong interest in various diverse strains of modernist practice, in fact, sometimes even within the same composition or painting. So we do see some of the this expressive abstraction that I suppose you you you could say was largely dictated or driven internationally by the American artists of the abstract expressionist movement. You see elements of pop art, especially in the 60s, and then you see, you know, certain attitudinal elements that one would associate with fluxus, conceptual art, and also the influence of graphic art, advertising, mass culture, which I suppose is part and parcel of a general interest, and also some of the main concerns of pop art. So this is an artist who at this time is obviously aware of trends in the United States as the sort of dominant force in developing aesthetics, artists such as Warhol, Liechtenstein, also Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg. One can also see a somewhat of an affinity maybe with some of the Italian artists of this generation, artists like Mimo Rotella, Valerio Adami, and also British artists like Alan Jones or Patrick Caulfield, artists that also embraced pop and mass culture as part of their aesthetic. So so he's a he's a he's a he's a modern artist, he's an artist of his time, and he's absorbing all of these different things that as a young artist in Denmark, he's actually somewhat progressive in identifying and embracing.

Jeppe Curth: 10:00

Could you maybe try to describe if you stand in front of the painting how it looks like, how it feels like?

Nicholas Robinson: 10:06

Well, I mean, there's there's many different bodies of work that he's produced. Maybe the best way is for us to have a little rundown of his major groups of works that he's made and the things that made his reputation and the things that people identify him with and expect of his work.

Jeppe Curth: 10:20

Yes, good. So so Also, maybe in that context, maybe also we can talk a little bit about how important this interdisciplinary practice has been for his paintings in the end.

Nicholas Robinson: 10:31

Absolutely. I mean I mean, all of these elements are key to what he's done, and we can talk about those as we run through the kinds of things that he's made during his working life. So, of course, we've we've we've talked about these sort of pop-related works. There's figural elements, there's elements of of graphic, graphic art and design, little things related to advertising, often sort of often in a sea of of somewhat painterly abstraction. So you've got these kind of conflicting ideas about art existing side by side on the same surface. A lot of these early works were made on Masonite, and he he he practiced these for for quite some years in in the 1960s. I suppose the the another important group of works from this period, from this generation, are what's known as his blackboard paintings. In 1964, Kikubi met Joseph Boyce when the German artist uh was visiting Copenhagen on one of his performance lecture tours. Now, Boyce had routinely used blackboards, especially in a performative way, where he he would give a lecture and he would be at the blackboard and he would be sort of annotating and illustrating his ideas graphically as he was speaking. He he was he was he was sort of sharing or describing his various visions of utopia and in the process was making complex and somewhat incomprehensible flowcharts with markings and arrows and and words and phrases, all of which were to demonstrate his idea of reordering society, uh art, life in general. And Kierkubi was very influenced by this and and subsequently made works that I think clearly are related to these, but the difference being Boyce's works were made with chalk and thus could be altered or erased, whereas Kierkubi's works, like all of his paintings, were made from the accumulation of many, many layers of paint. So that's the blackboard paintings. And then there was a group of paintings that he made for a short period, and perhaps these could be considered the the the most little known body of works that he made. They're called the Overpaintings. And these are paintings, found paintings, existing paintings that Kierkegaard sourced and acquired from charity shops, flea markets, and painted over them. And in actual fact, there's there are some sort of visual echoes of Sigmar Polka in these in these paintings. But it but in these works, Kierkegaard was interested in sentimentality and kitsch as a sort of a facet of of modern life, and he was using these paintings as as a way of exploring that. And then we come on to the body of work that you began referencing, and and that would be what we would describe as his neo-expressionist landscapes, the typology of which would be the works that would cement his international reputation. So shall we talk a bit about these paintings, the paintings that the ones he's most known for? I mean, this is the foundation of his market, the foundation of his understanding, or the our understanding of what he's he's about. Yeah. Okay. So in the 1970s, he began to increasingly gravitate towards the natural world as the sort of main dominant theme of his work. And and and what he would do is he would discover in the layers and layers of building up an oil painting a way of making a work that that to him was very analogous with his engagement or echoed his engagement and understanding of the natural world. It was this body of work that that founded his reputation internationally because it was with paintings such as these that he represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 1976. So this was a a key breakout thing for him and marked the beginning of a period of sustained success. And these paintings we can describe them as very much inspired by landscape, especially a very sort of rugged Nordic terrain. They're very dense layered surfaces, often with very strong but very earthy colour palettes. There's a lot of muted colours that reflect the earth, that reflect things that grow in the earth, that reflect rocks and soil, different lights, different seasons. They're non-figurative, but they're very strongly suggestive of cliffs or forests, waterfalls, horizons, a lot of these sort of natural, naturally occurring phenomena very much evoked by these paintings. You you could say that he he was influenced by German neo-expressionism, but his paintings s are much more s restrained, they're much more analytical and structural than than emotional, I guess you could say. So apart from his paintings, I suppose he's most known for his brick sculptures, and we can describe those in a second. And then another very important group of works conceptually are his bronze sculptures, because they're also somehow formed from his idea about geological rock formations and the sort of substance of the of the rocks that we stand on that one finds in nature. So if we talk first about the brick sculptures, in 1971 he travelled to Central America to study Mayan art and architecture, and he was very inspired by these buildings. But I think also he he still had in the back of his mind his great love for Grundwigskirke that I think never left him. And in 1973, he made his very first brick sculpture in Ekest in the middle of Jutland. So these brick sculptures were to become a group of works that he would revisit throughout his his working life, and and one finds them in all kinds of public and civic places, up and down not only Denmark, also in Germany, in Belgium. I mean there there's there there's quite a lot of them in public spaces throughout mainland Europe. Some of them are smaller and sort of totemic in in their feel, and some of them are much larger scale and and and a much more of an all-encompassing environment. And and we can describe them as freestanding architectural forms made entirely from industrial bricks. They're just brick, brickwork, all kinds of complex, simple and complex brickworks making these freestanding structures. And in them he's essaying many different forms of brickwork. We find steps, we find arches, we find pediments, arcading, niches, windows and openings. So they have a sort of a complex feel as a as if they're a a sort of a real an inverted commas structure, but they have no functional interior, and they are only supposed to be experienced spatially. You walk around them, you walk in them and through them, and you see how the how all the different constituent parts relate to each other. Now, the reference for these quite many and varied. They are of course made of from brick, they do, in a very literal sense, sort of reference the earth, some of the structures and shapes one finds in the earth, but they also very clearly reflect, you know, man's role living on the earth. So they show his interest in architecture, they show his interest in things like permanence, which of course is a key idea if one is a student of rocks, and also historical memory. So they're they're they're they're very they're a very distinctive part of his output and and a key thing also that people think of when they think of his work. Now the bronze sculptures are much, much smaller in scale, but they are also key to his ideas. They were sculpted in plaster and then cast in bronze. Now these are not they're much more organic, rougher, more fragmented than the brick sculptures, and these more more specifically echo natural processes such as sedimentation and erosion, the two key tenets of his main idea about, you know, the the the earth, sort of the tectonic or sedimentary plates underneath where we where we walk and live, etc. And these are much more tactile and intimate that than the brickworks. And and you know, you asked him you asked me in terms of how he would see these things. And and and and when when he was asked about the differences between his paintings and his sculptures, this is this is what he replied. I see them as all mixed up together. Structure, space, tactile qualities, the way the light is handled by the surface. Both media are about these kinds of things. So that gives you an idea that for him they're sort of inseparable and just various diverse ways of exploring the same the same ideas.

Jeppe Curth: 20:44

Okay Nick, thanks on that note we we now get I think we have a good sense of how the works look going through it, the important periods, these things, but how do they all fit together?

Nicholas Robinson: 20:56

Well of course when you have different different bodies of work you know often they they all reflect different facets of of of main overarching themes and and Kierkubi's work is no different in that respect. So we we can look at the the the the the key themes as follows and all of the works are sort of emblematic of this in one way or another. So the first is is is nature as structure not scenery. So since he's trained as a geologist Kierku had learned to read landscape as as a kind of set of systems formed over time not as sort of picturesque views in the in the sense of the romantic sublime perhaps very different to that. So so he was he was even though there's a strong evocation of nature and natural phenomena in the paintings he was rejecting sort of literal or naturalistic depiction the landscapes in his paintings we can see that they they feel compressed folded stratified reflecting his interests in in geology but to him what matters was not appearance really what mattered more was process sedimentation erosion pressure. All of these things that developed something over time so that's why his paintings often seem abstract yet very grounded almost like you could say they're almost cross sections of the earth rather than specific views of it. So that's the first thing so a key component of that also we see in the paintings and in the brick sculptures that that geology had taught Kierkaby to to think in terms of layers. Now both the paintings and the sculptures are built up through repeated layering of rows upon rows of stuff on top of other rows and rows of stuff be they bricks or paint. In the paintings we see not only layering but we see scraping and repainting and we see earlier layers that can remain partially visible like geological strata that have been exposed through erosion. So so meaning in these paintings is derived from accumulation. That's the the the the key thing there's not really a symbolic meaning the the the method in layering like this is designed to oppose the idea of like a sort of a single decisive or expressive gesture. Instead the totality of the work the accumulation of the layers itself becomes a record of time so that's another key idea geology is something that of course operates on you know profoundly enormous timescales vastly exceeding our own human history so we have a deep time and and kind of anti-narrative component to the work the work avoids messages or stories. The forms designed to feel inevitable as if they're shaped by forces that are somehow even beyond his intention and this is another key thing that aligns him against the kind of romantic storytelling idea that I mentioned a moment ago so when you have this idea you have ruin when you have erosion you have ruin and and and geology is something that I guess normalizes decay. So when you see his paintings you see as I mentioned the layers previous layers often showing through but in his sculptures they often are also designed to resemble ruins or fragments pieces of a whole and even though they're sort of cogent and intact they're not sort of like crumbling or fractured they still have a sense that they are that there's maybe pieces that have kind of been removed or or missing over time. They can appear very weathered even when when they're new and all of these ideas is also aligning him against other prevalent ideas of modernism which is a which is a kind of the idea of like purity and perfection of an object as espoused by somebody like Donald Judd or Sol Lewitt for instance. All of these things take us to a certain kind of view of nature where there's a sort of a might and timelessness and inevitability about nature that is so much more substantial insignificant than us as humans. So so there's a certain ethical position in this where where there's a s a kind of humility in the face of nature. Humans are very temporary, nature is very indifferent to that and as a result art and artists who make art should obviously acknowledge its limitations and this all of this kind of ethos somewhat of a puritanical or Lutheran ethos as well you might say this gave his work a little bit of a quiet gravity rather than having a sort of heroic ambition as part of its objective which maybe you could say is more more in keeping with the action painting the Rosenbergian action painting idea of somebody like Jackson Pollock for instance so maybe this is is is between these two sections but Kigebu held a professorship in Frankfurt an exhibit across Europe and the US how did this international position shape his market well he's he's I mean he's represented Denmark in the Venice Biennale on numerous occasions so of course if an artist is doing that then he is going to gain a good deal of international exposure and he's going to have lots of opportunities for his work to be acquired by important institutions and collections around the world but for many many years his work has been represented by a gallery called Michael Werner and and this is a very eminent German gallery founded all the way back in 1963 in Berlin and over the years have variously had locations in Cologne, London, New York and Beverly Hills so so when you have a top gallery you know representing your work you have a very good chance of getting you know a high level of international exposure. I mean this is a gallery that's known for amongst many other things representing Peter Doyck for almost 25 years and he's one of the world's most expensive artists still living and working. I mean this is a professional relationship that endured until relatively recently but it was a very long standing and kind of famous partnership in in the art world. So you know he he's he's his his work is in you know very large numbers of public collections certainly all the eminent ones globally and he's been having significant museum retrospectives globally since even the late 1980s I mean he had a significant retrospective at Louisiana in 1990 another one in 1991 at MIT at the Visual Arts Centre there and then since you know 2008 2009 again in Louisiana he's had one at the Tate Modern he's had one at the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf he's had one at the Phillips Collection Washington DC Palais de Beaux-Arts in Paris I mean these are significant international institutions in all of the you know main sort of art conversant corners of the world and and he's you know been awarded solo retrospectives in these places. Can we talk a little bit about his prices? The gallery prices well you know it varies because it's a secondary market. We can see quite a big range of course it depends on the period of work and then subjective criteria such as the quality of the work the size of the work but but I would say a reasonable rule of thumb is works from around sixty thousand dollars euros up to around eight hundred thousand dollars or euros we see in the gallery uh arena is very commonplace to find large scale paintings and by that I mean two meter plus works and they're always in the range at 300,000 to sort of six hundred thousand wouldn't you say correct? Yeah exactly sometimes also higher yeah sometimes higher I mean like I said you do see them up to 800,000 but you know the the sort of the the critical mass is in that middle band from a quarter of a million bucks up to six hundred thousand or thereabouts. Whenever we see a major painting at an art fair you know you ask the price it's six hundred thousand it's four hundred and fifty thousand and of course depending on the various qualitative criteria or scale criteria that we mentioned that's what influences the that number because the record price is six hundred and seventy five thousand dollars from 2012 but a major work did sell in Germany in the middle of last year for almost the same amount 650 660 and three of the top five prices of all time at auction were achieved in 2025. So that's quite an interesting we see a lot of high prices 2012 1314 then we see a a sort of a quiet drop off lesser volume lower top prices for the major paintings but in the last 12 months we've seen three of the top five prices at all time overall there have been more than a dozen results at auction higher than 400,000 all of which are for these mature geological paintings all of which were made between seventy eight his sort of first phase of these works and the early 2000s and there there have been more than 25 results $2500 or higher and more than a hundred results at auction again above a hundred thousand dollars. So this is you know a longstanding I suppose very stable position in what we would call the middle market of artists' prices generally. The record price for a sculpture incidentally is only say that advisedly only $181,000 and that was also achieved in 2025 also at an auction in Germany in fact if you want to have a work or you want to buy a work that will do well on auction, what what is the sweet spot on on on a Kirkabu work in terms of what one should buy?

Jeppe Curth: 31:38

Yet to buy or to sell again what would be the sweet spot what what do you think well it's very it's difficult to be very precise.

Nicholas Robinson: 31:44

You know whenever you look to buy anything you have to be very rigorous in in how you compare it to other things that have sold on the market other things that might be currently available on the market. But you know you want a painting that's got a good array of earthly earthy colours you know the the the the greens the browns the sort of rusty some sort of mustardy yellow something that's not you know he didn't make any paintings that one could consider very bright or garish but some have a you know any good painting of course has a balance of those components that that when one has looked at many one can sort of recognise and then of course you've got the stratification of the layers where you've got interesting sort of scraping and grattage where layers have been scraped away you've got nice accumulation of impasto and then you've got this more sort of graphic element on top that's either painted in a more linear fashion the the sort of the the cliffs and and and more kind of geological formations that one can sort of identify and these often some somehow follow the the the contours of the colours but they kind of define you know various sort of passages blocks within the paintings. So anything that has a really pleasing balance of those components and is well priced relative to things that are a bit like those things are are are great things to have but I would say the sweet spot for acquisitions would be you know i i if you if you look at a big painting that's like two meters and you and and you and you at an art fair and it's it's $450,000 or it's you know $600,000 I think I think it's you know that's out of the price range of many people. And I think given the the scale of QB's achievements and and the relative value of them compared to other you know many younger artists artists with less achievements much less standing are much more expensive. So there's value in those paintings but they're already somewhat pricey. But those paintings to me are inevitably million dollar plus paintings of tomorrow quite exactly what tomorrow is I don't know is it next year is it three years but I think invariably it's not there's not going to be a loss of value in Kukaby's paintings. But but I think if one wants to find opportunity you can find a smaller scale painting you can find a painting that's one meter twenty one meter forty one meter something that has enough scale and heft to be absolutely like emblematic of what he's done but it's kind of a fraction of the price of a bigger painting and yet encompasses all of the same aesthetic traits. And you can pick those up if you're lucky for $50 $60 $800 and maybe if you you can find a you know a great one that's a bit smaller than a two meter painting but you maybe get one of those for $150 $160,000. And I think those ones have quite a lot of room to grow because it's a kind of scale where you get everything you want but it's also the kind of scale that has a large possible future market because most people can accommodate something that size. Do you have any idea where the biggest demand are is it still the whole market in Denmark I have the data so I'm just asking well then I'll let you do the talking I I don't think you will be surprised Germany yeah of course it is and then Denmark and in the in the UK well you know the Germans and the Danes are somewhat closely related culturally aesthetically attitudinal yeah yeah they are certainly to an Englishman however Germany is also a big country that has a lot of money that has a lot of kind of bourgeois collecting in many different cities you've got Hamburg Berlin Munich Frankfurt Cologne Düsseldorf all of these vibrant places for buying and selling and for collector communities so I I'm I I'm not surprised that Germany's by far the biggest environment for his work to be bought and sold good compared to other painters I know it's always a difficult thing to do with similar weight in museums how does Kirk market valuation look like if compared to other painters significantly less I mean I mean I th you know there's no completely apposite point of reference for his work but you know I I mean I mentioned the work of Polk I mentioned we can mention artists like Kiefer artists even like Twombly who in the 70s actually did a series of works called Natural History works which were all about sort of different ideas of nature and geology and growing things and what have you but but these are artists whose works are I mean Twombly's maybe a little bit of a a stretch in a way but these are artists whose works are enormously m more expensive and I don't really see why Kirkbee would not enjoy at least enough of a revival of interest or renaissance to get much closer to those artists than he is currently I mean it's i it's a bit extraordinary to me that there I mean I it's probably highly likely that there are works by Kirkabee that have traded for a round or more than a million dollars. There are probably some but given that there's not a single result on record, there's they're probably not that it's probably not commonplace that that's happened. But that's surprising to me and I feel that it's a bit of an inevitability that it will for the right thing.

Jeppe Curth: 37:25

So you go so far to call it an opportunity?

Nicholas Robinson: 37:28

Well well I think I think that whenever we do one of these episodes, I think one of our ideas is that there's always a sense that that's part and parcel of what we're either explicitly talking about or at the very least intimating or implying and I think that yes that that there are m many many paintings by Kirkabe that probably could be considered excellent value, especially when set against other modernist masters with the same or similar pedigrees and track records. And certainly when set against much younger emerging or super contemporary artists whose work is you know has that kind of flavor of the month price attached to it.

Jeppe Curth: 38:22

Yeah and on that note we own works by Kigabi we recommend Kigaboo advisory stuff.

Nicholas Robinson: 38:28

I think he's tremendous painter. Now some of his paintings feel gloomy honestly they're they're they're they're dark they're somber but there's a there's a gravity to them and I think there's such a strong reverence for nature that there's just you know there's a tremendously sort of stoic beauty in that idea and and of course if you learn more about the ideas that drove him which is one of the purposes of why we talk about it then you can start to see you know how how much of a sort of a a an a net a nature visionary he was so for a collector entering the Kibi market or want to understand more about the Kirki market and his paintings war what should be the primary focus?

Jeppe Curth: 39:17

Should it be the looking into period, the scale, the material?

Nicholas Robinson: 39:21

Yeah I think I think I think that the surefire thing to focus on would be this paintings and paintings made from 76 77 78 all the way through to the 2000s prior to his death his bronzes are very nice but you know sculpture is always a little bit more of a niche category maybe maybe some of the blackboard masonite works could be interesting because of course they have unmistakable hallmarks of his mode of expression in them and they are more affordable. But I think that his his sort of signature neo expressionist paintings is just ideological paintings would be would be the thing that I would go for for sure.

Jeppe Curth: 40:08

And another question a little bit the same, but is there is there something and collectors should avoid also when they're looking at auction periods, things that he had made.

Nicholas Robinson: 40:19

Well I I mean I don't know if there's something specific that you're referring to. I'm not I'm not just just uh we know it's a secondary market and another I mean there's listen there's all c you know he's he's been an interesting artist since since the middle of the 1960s. Of course the works that he made in the 60s you could call them sort of proto Kirkabe in that they're not fully formed. But you know you go to any museum especially in Denmark I guess you could say you'll see examples that have this agglomeration of different styles some abstract painting some pop graphic quality to them you know there's some really great paintings and they are they have a price attached to them maybe we could say that's not crazy cheap because they're historically significant but because they're not his sort of prime output they're a bit less so I mean th there's perhaps you could say there's a there's a curcuby that it is interesting for many different kinds of budgets but only some of them are likely to you know appreciate in the kind of way or appreciate financially I should say in the kind of way that we're you know hoping to achieve I think uh we covered the most of uh Pierre Keki the Danish artist which I'm very happy to talk about.

Jeppe Curth: 41:42

Me too I love his work it's great. Anything we uh we're missing?

Nicholas Robinson: 41:48

No I don't think so I mean there's there's there's a there's there's quite a lot of information you can find if you're inclined to to search there's quite a nice video from many years ago on YouTube one of Louisiana's videos in their sort of artist interview series and that was conducted between Paul Erictoyner the the director there and Kirkabee quite some years ago and and and I mean he's he's rather a dry character I mean there's not a lot of there's no flamboyance there's a very sort of you know quiet earnestness to him the way he talks about his work but it's actually it's really nice to hear the two of them speaking about it and that will give I think quite a lot of insight into understanding him and his you know his work. So I would recommend that if one wants just an easily easily digestible sort of overview perhaps. Good thank you Nick thank you for sharing your insight on I guess one of Denmark's most important artists Yeah I mean I mean I think I you know you always run the risk of of of sort of pigeonholing somebody by saying oh you know he's he's you know he's he's Denmark's most important artist but I mean he's more than that he's a really he's a he's a globally important artist and that of course is a source of pride to Denmark and Danes. But uh but uh but he's not he's not a provincial voice he's a major 20th century voice but I think his market has actually been a a bit more parochial than his achievements deserve and that's where we're able to identify perhaps opportunity existing. That's where it gets interesting.

Jeppe Curth: 43:26

Yeah good thank you it's been a pleasure as always thank you that was it for this episode of the Collector's Edge if you are looking for expert insights want to make informed decisions and would like advice from independent advisors send us an email or maybe just call us you can find all the info on our website Nordegartpartners.com thank you for listening and we hope to have you back for another episode bye