Per Kirkeby

'Because I'm from Denmark, my career has developed slowly," says Per Kirkeby, an artist who's been critically acclaimed in Europe since the 1970s but has taken 33 years to mosey out to L.A. The subject of an exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery, Kirkeby's work has been shown regularly since 1964 throughout Europe, where he's represented by heavyweight dealer Michael Werner.

'Because I'm from Denmark, my career has developed slowly," says Per Kirkeby, an artist who's been critically acclaimed in Europe since the 1970s but has taken 33 years to mosey out to L.A. The subject of an exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery, Kirkeby's work has been shown regularly since 1964 throughout Europe, where he's represented by heavyweight dealer Michael Werner.

Seen from the outside, Copenhagen's new Opera House, with its bubble-faced front gently squeezed by a flat, thin roof, is akin to a giant lantern on the city's waterfront. The front lodges a five-story foyer and another bubble, inspired by a conch, covered with golden Danish maple. The main auditorium is coated on the inside with dark maple and has three horseshoe-shaped balconies. It can seat up to 1,700 people. Besides the main stage, the opera has five side and back stages.

Ben Vautier's sculpture "Ben's Museum" is a stark encapsulation of the wittily insightful rigor of which Fluxus art of the 1960s and 1970s was capable. In its way, though, it also exposes a certain flabbiness within the movement's core. The sculpture, which turns up near the end of the large and ambitious exhibition "In the Spirit of Fluxus," newly opened at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, is composed of a large wooden packing crate--the kind in which paintings are typically shipped or stored.

France lost its status as the world's artistic and intellectual capital following a flowering after World War II. Because the French pursue an unquenchable quest for La Gloire they have been trying ever since to recoup. It's really sort of lovable. Governments, however, are incapable of legislating talent, so they usually fall back on the creation of institutions. France is no exception. For a decade and more it has been spawning culture palaces faster than you can flick a dust mote off your lapel.

For the third time in 20 years, the "Sculpture Project" has come to town. And, it's a pleasure. Organized by the Westphalian Regional Museum and curators Kasper Konig and Klaus Bussmann, the exhibition consists of temporary new work for mostly urban spaces by more than 60 international artists. Blessedly, there is no theme--except to see what a variety of mostly talented artists will do when invited to work in the complicated environment of the public arena.

On April 2, this city celebrated the 200th birthday of Hans Christian Andersen with an extravaganza called "Once Upon a Time" that featured the likes of Tina Turner and Renee Fleming and was broadcast throughout Europe. Danish politicians were outraged at the tacky image of their country it projected. One member of Parliament likened the stadium show to a cheap, second-class copy of "Holiday on Ice." The minister of culture has been called on the carpet.

At L.A. Louver Gallery, a well-selected group of 13 oil paintings and eight bronze sculptures by Danish artist Per Kirkeby serves as a substantial introduction to work that's well-known in Europe but rarely seen in the United States. Kirkeby's California debut is an affair of significant magnitude, even though its insistently understated works make such claims sound overblown and pretentious.

Per Kirkeby's subdued paintings move at a glacial pace: slowly, steadily and with unstoppable forcefulness. At L.A. Louver Gallery, nine new oils on canvas eschew eye-grabbing flash for the incremental processes of nature, both botanical and geological. The life cycles of organic matter, including seasonal moss, perennial underbrush and century-spanning trees, take shape across the densely packed surfaces of Kirkeby's fecund canvases.

The 1995 Carnegie International exhibition is something of a puzzlement. This 52nd outing of the periodic survey of recent art looks at the work of 36 artists; it includes 15 sculptors, 13 painters and eight camera artists--photography, film, video--a good number of them first-rate. Why, then, does it feel so flat and uninspired?

Every two years, contemporary art stages a suicide mission in the most beautiful city on Earth. If the Bellinis and Tintorettos in Venice's dizzying architecture are surprised by the sudden pipsqueak competition, they don't let on. The spell of the place keeps going and going, powered by a race of geniuses centuries in the grave.