GUANGZHOU.- VeneKlasen announced the opening of Per Kirkeby: I Make My Own System at the Tadao Ando-designed He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde, Guangzhou, China. This marks the first exhibition dedicated to Per Kirkeby to take place in Asia in nearly two decades.

The exhibition focuses on Kirkeby’s paintings, brick sculptures – presented both within the museum and throughout the city – and a series of bronzes that are models for his brick works. It also marks the debut of his brick sculptures in China.

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) is regarded as one of the most influential and versatile artists of his generation. Over a career spanning five decades, he worked across an extraordinary range of media, including painting, sculpture, and brick installations, as well as poetry, filmmaking, and set and costume design for ballet and theatre. Before enrolling at the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen in 1962, Kirkeby studied natural history and geology. During these years he took part in numerous expeditions to Greenland and the Arctic, and later traveled to Central America – journeys that would leave a lasting impression on his artistic development. The works on view at the He Art Museum reveal Kirkeby’s acute sensibility to the natural world and his remarkable ability to evoke geology and organic structure across the diverse media he explored.

Kirkeby’s paintings oscillate between landscape and abstraction and share a quiet kinship with Chinese landscape traditions. Layers of paint accumulate to evoke tectonic surfaces, rock formations and water, shifting and layering over one another like geological strata. This geological sensibility extends into his sculptural practice. In both his brick structures and bronze models, Kirkeby draws on his understanding of the instability of nature to translate natural processes into structural forms that remain in dialogue with their natural surroundings.

Brick sculptures have been central to Kirkeby’s work since 1966, when he first began using local masonry brick as a sculptural medium. Inspired by the material’s ubiquity in Danish architecture, he developed a prolific engagement with brick that balances minimalist aesthetics with a sense of the familiar. Over the course of his career, Kirkeby created brick installations across Europe, with notable examples at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, Château La Coste in France, and the Humlebæk Train Station near the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, among many other locations.

Per Kirkeby: I Make My Own System opened at the He Art Museum on 22 March 2026 and remains on view through 30 June 2026. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Shen Qilan and Birte Kleemann and is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue featuring contributions from the curators, selected poems and writings by the artist, and essays by Dorthe Aagesen, Lucas Haberkorn, and the late art historian Peter Schjeldahl.