Achim Borchardt-Hume Knihy

Born in Denmark in 1938, Per Kirkeby gained renown as a leading figure in the New Painting movement of the 1980s, alongside artists such as Georg Baselitz and A.R. Penck. Kirkeby’s fervent excavation of art history across a range of styles and media reflect his training as a geologist. This lavishly illustrated book, the most comprehensive volume on Kirkeby ever published in English, traces the trajectory of an artistic career that has spanned half a century.Beginning with Kirkeby’s early history paintings and moving through his engagement with Pop Art, sculpture, large-scale “heroic” paintings, and his pastoral “Walden” series of the 1990s, the book contrasts his monumental works with previously unpublished small-scale watercolors of Greenland landscapes, etchings, and the blackboards on which Kirkeby mapped out his ideas. With a newly commissioned essay by Richard Shiff, an interview with the artist conducted by curator Achim Borchardt-Hume, and a selection of Kirkeby’s own extensive writings, the book provides invaluable insight into the mind of an inimitable artist.

Gerhard Richter is widely seen as one of the most important painters at work in the world today. Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932, he left for the West in 1961, settling in Dusseldorf, where he held his first exhibition in 1963. He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, including retrospectives in New York, Paris and Dusseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne. As the artist draws near to his eightieth birthday in 2012, Tate Modern in collaboration with the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, is staging a major retrospective exhibition. Exhibition: Tate Modern, London 6 October 2011 - 8 January 2012 / Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin February - April 2012 / Centre Pompidou, Paris 6 June - 24 September 2012.