Curated by Rita Selvaggio

Casa Masaccio | Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea is delighted to present THE IDEA OF NORTH: Per Kirkeby – Lars von Trier, which will open on 4 March at 6 pm (4 March-18 June 2023).
After Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet: Films and Their Sites (2020) and Chantal Akerman – ROOMS: On Keeping and Losing (2022), THE IDEA OF NORTH is part of the programme ESPORRE IL CINEMA conceived and curated by Rita Selvaggio, a series of exhibitions devoted to the directors who have been awarded the Premio Marco Melani. For its 16th edition (2022) the prize has been assigned to the Danish director Lars von Trier for the relations his cinema establishes with history, the history of art, the epic and literature. Taking its title from Glenn Gould’s celebrated radio broadcast in 1967, the route through the exhibition will consist, like the latter, of a journey through states of mind that will include as a counterpoint the work of Per Kirkeby (Copenhagen 1938-2018). In his native Denmark, Kirkeby is considered a sort of national treasure, an artist of exceptional talent whose intense and moody works are believed to express the spirit of the country. He has contributed to the creative vision of the following films by Lars von Trier:

Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000),Antichrist (2009).

For Breaking the Waves, for example, he painted the intros to the eight chapters into which the novel-like structure of the film is divided, panoramas in the Romantic mould that rework photographs taken by Lars von Trier himself and enchanted and mournful long shots that draw on the work of artists like Turner, Constable, Friedrich and Munch.

Kirkeby’s practice and career spanned five decades, over which he produced a body of powerful and unique works: sculpture, architecture, film, poetry, art criticism, travel writing, sets for ballets and theatrical performances, costumes. But his first love had been the geology of the arctic regions, a discipline that informed much of his multifaceted production, along with nature in general.

Journeys to the farthest latitudes, which he saw not just as existential adventures but also as linguistic devices, and painting were the constants of his life. From the twenty odd expeditions to Greenland (the last of them in 2011, at the age of 73, aboard a three-masted schooner) to his repeated missions of study in the Pacific, sailing between the islands of Polynesia or walking in the deserts of Australia, always carrying his sketchbook in an attempt to fix in watercolour not so much the landscape itself as impressions of it that would serve to reflect his moods.

In the layout of the exhibition, the bronze models or bozzetti of his large and explorable sculptures, which the artist regarded as ‘architectural studies’ of forms, combine expressive and emotional possibilities and animate the polyphony of voices produced by Lars von Trier’s images. Extrapolating the geological tissue from under the skin of reality, its material stratification reflecting the accumulation of time, they occupy the rooms of Casa Masaccio in an erratic expanse. The selection of Lars von Trier’s images highlights the major themes of his cinema: religion, psychoanalysis, a dark, perverse and innocent femininity, constrained and liberated by a violent sexuality. Von Trier’s women are pure, visionary and lone, unyielding protagonists of compelling stories whose visual impact makes them even more unforgettable.

The whole of Lars Von Trier’s work appears to be held together by an underlying artistic coherence of which what is often most striking is its pictorial intensity. The examples are multiple, from the Ophelia of Melancholia (2011), whose title is borrowed from an engraving made by Albrecht Dürer in 1514, to the image of Kirsten Dunst, star of the film, floating in a wedding dress that carries her off into a watery void, a citation of the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, to that of the woman lying on a rock in the same film, a clear reference to Giorgione. Or again, The Barque of Dante (1822), a painting by Eugène Delacroix representing the vessel with which Phlegyas ferried damned souls across the Styx, whose iconography is used in the form of a tableau vivant in the epilogue of The House that Jack Built (2018). Also cited in this film are some of William Blake’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno and, in the ‘epilogue-katabasis’, the poet’s description of the Malebolge orients the moment of passage through the eighth ditch in which the fraudulent are punished.

Lars von Trier’s cinema cites, reinterprets, absorbs. It is the result of an absolutely personal reworking that does not forget the models to which it makes reference.

While still very young he had tackled the classics with Medea (1988), proposing a personal version of the myth. Based on a screenplay by Carl Theodor Dreyer that had never been made into a film, it is set in the cold and desolate wastes of Jutland, amidst misty and spectral landscapes, boundless expanses of wilderness and a series of marshes and bogs. In a hypothetic Nordic Middle Ages that retreats towards the polar night or the midnight aurora in the summer sky, Lars von Trier bestows a timeless dimension on the narration and Medea’s savagery becomes an absolute and metaphysical, ancestral entity, almost a metaphor for nature and the earth.

Per Kirkeby (Copenhagen 1938 – 2018) is one of Scandinavia’s most important 20th century artists.  An internationally celebrated painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and author, works by Kirkeby are found in many museum collections worldwide including Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others.  Important solo museum exhibitions include Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum Jorn, Silkeborg; the Beaux-Arts de Paris; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Tate Modern, London; IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Lars von Trier Danish director born in 1956, he is co-founder of the Danish production company Zentropa e one of the founders of the Dogma 95 collective. His films have won prizes all over the world,including some of the major awards from the Cannes Film Festival: the Palme d’Or for “Dancer in the Dark” and the Grand Jury Prize for “Breaking the Waves” as well as awards for two leading actresses, Charlotte Gainsbourg in “Antichrist” and Kirsten Dunst in “Melancholia”

Initiative promoted by:
Comune di San Giovanni Valdarno
Casa Masaccio | Centro per l’arte contemporanea

Realised:
under the patronage of the Royal Danish Embassy – Rome
under the patronage and with the contribution of the Ministry of Culture – Directorate General for Cinema and Audio-visuals
under the patronage and with the contribution of the Danish Arts Foundation
with the support of the Regione Toscana

in collaboration with:
Freeze Frame Gallery
Zentropa
Michael Werner Gallery, New York, London and Berlin.

Thanks to:
Lars von Trier (ArtvonTrier)
Jens-Otto Paludan (Freeze Frame Gallery)
Ida Harder, Peter Aalbæk Jensen, Lárus Ren Gudbjörnsson (Zentropa)
Gordon VeneKlasen, Kadee Robbins, John McGill (Michael Werner Gallery)

Entrance free of charge | Opening hours: weekdays 3-7 pm, Sundays and holidays 10-12 am/3-7 pm