Per Kirkeby’s Untitled of 1989 belongs to his celebrated series of Tavler, or “Blackboard Paintings,” one of the most conceptually distinctive bodies of work within his career. Kirkeby first introduced the blackboard format in the early 1970s, developing works in which drawing, erasure, overpainting, and accumulation became metaphors for geological and historical time. Museum Jorn has described these boards as layered fields in which some chalk marks remain visible while others are partially wiped away, producing what it calls an “aesthetic trace of memory.” By 1989, the format had become fully integrated into Kirkeby’s mature practice, and examples from that year are documented as mixed-media works on blackboard measuring approximately 125 centimeters square.

The present work exemplifies the tension between drawing and painting that defines the series. Against the dark, abraded surface, angular structures in rust-orange, white, acid green, and red appear to emerge and recede. Some resemble architectural frameworks: pitched roofs, walls, beams, or skeletal enclosures. Others behave more like geological strata, fault lines, or diagrams whose meanings remain deliberately unresolved. Kirkeby constructs the image through superimposition rather than conventional perspective. Forms cross, cancel, and partially obscure one another, producing the sensation that several spatial systems occupy the same surface at once.

This layered structure is inseparable from Kirkeby’s background as a geologist. Before establishing himself internationally as an artist, he trained in geology and participated in scientific expeditions, experiences that profoundly shaped his understanding of landscape, structure, sedimentation, and erosion. His paintings rarely describe nature directly. Instead, they reproduce processes analogous to nature: accumulation, collapse, pressure, fragmentation, and renewal. The blackboard becomes an especially appropriate support for this way of thinking because it is inherently associated with inscription and erasure. Marks seem temporary even when materially fixed.

That paradox is central to the Tavler. Joseph Beuys, whom Kirkeby encountered in Copenhagen in 1964, had famously used blackboards as part of lectures and performances, covering them with diagrams whose provisional character was essential to their meaning. Kirkeby’s works retain something of that association, but with an important difference. As Christie’s has noted, Beuys’s chalk marks could be wiped away, whereas Kirkeby built his blackboards through layers of paint, producing surfaces that evoke sediment accumulating over time. What looks provisional is therefore materially permanent.

In the 1989 painting, this contradiction produces much of the work’s psychological force. The orange linear structures seem almost diagrammatic, as though Kirkeby were mapping an architectural idea directly onto the surface. Yet they are surrounded by looser white and green marks that destabilize any coherent reading. The forms resemble buildings without becoming buildings, landscapes without becoming landscapes. A looping configuration at lower left could suggest vegetation, roots, or an eddying geological formation, while the central mass resembles a structure undergoing collapse. The work remains suspended between construction and dissolution.

Kirkeby’s mature paintings repeatedly exploit this ambiguity. Architecture and geology become parallel systems: both are built through layers, both contain histories, and both eventually deteriorate. A wall can become a ruin; rock can fracture into sediment; a drawn structure can be obscured by another layer of marks. The image therefore operates less as a depiction of a particular place than as a model of transformation.

The black ground reinforces this sense of temporal depth. It is not a neutral field but a worked surface carrying traces of abrasion, wiping, and previous marks. Faint passages remain beneath the stronger colored lines, suggesting earlier stages of the composition that have not disappeared completely. The surface functions almost archaeologically. Rather than presenting a single resolved image, Kirkeby allows earlier pictorial states to remain visible beneath later ones.

This process reflects the larger importance of the blackboard paintings within his practice. They unite several of Kirkeby’s central concerns: geology, drawing, architecture, memory, and the instability of images. Their apparent informality is deceptive. Each mark participates in a larger system of accumulation and revision in which the painting becomes an archive of its own making.

By 1989, Kirkeby had already achieved international recognition and was deeply engaged with the European painting culture surrounding Galerie Michael Werner, where his work developed alongside artists such as Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, and A.R. Penck. The period from 1978 to 1989 is widely regarded as central to his international breakthrough, and the catalogue raisonné for these years specifically treats the blackboard works as an essential component of his mature production.

Untitled therefore occupies an important position within Kirkeby’s late-1980s practice. Its fractured architectures and unstable linear networks transform the blackboard into something more than a support for drawing. It becomes a metaphor for historical consciousness itself: a surface upon which images are created, erased, remembered, and overwritten. What appears at first to be a spontaneous accumulation of colored lines gradually reveals a far more complex structure, one in which nature, architecture, and memory are subjected to the same processes of formation and decay.

In this sense, Kirkeby’s Tavler are among his most concentrated statements about time. The image never exists as a single fixed moment. It is instead the visible residue of successive states, each partially surviving beneath the next. In the 1989 Untitled, Kirkeby turns the blackboard into a kind of geological section of painting itself, where every line becomes a layer and every erasure leaves behind a trace.