Per Kirkeby

"A structure-less painting is, to me, a painting that does not matter. Structure mirrors your degree of responsibility toward the work. You can’t just let it float around in pretty colors. It needs a k…"

"Landscapes are about beauty and death. The only way you can define beauty.. ..is to know that death is hiding behind it. This is what haunts you when you’re doing a so-called landscape painting."

"But through the 1990's I developed signatures, somewhat radical and unmistakably mine. Francis Picabia remains my hero. The more you dive into his work, the wilder it becomes. He painted the skewed Cu…"

"I became part of this German wave of new painting and sculpture , even though I didn’t fit in. Baselitz and the other young German artists, their paintings were demonstrative figuration, while my work…"

"At my age , you realize that some things have caught you. You can see that as a positive or a negative. On the negative side: Are you in a routine, unconsciously adapting to things that work well?.. .…"

"Thus it is with all pictures, there are many layers, and with good reason an analysis nearly always deals with the last . The last layer in a superficial sense. But how then can one talk of what one c…"

"To achieve the structure it takes a damn long time, so my paintings are always in work for a very long time—sometimes a year. Not that I work on them every day. I will have them, and then come back to…"

"Painting is laying layer upon layer. Without exception it is fundamental to all painted pictures even if they look as if they were done in one movement. The movement has always crossed its own track s…"