Skumring (Sunset), 1983-84

Before becoming an artist, Per Kirkeby, who was born in Copenhagen in 1938, worked as a geologist, a scientist who lives in direct contact with the earth and goes on expeditions (including to the polar regions that attracted Kirkeby) to study the history of the planet through its strata of rock.

But a geologist “returns home,” Kirkeby says, and writes a “diary full of maps and tables, graphic hypotheses traced out while hunched over a sharpened feather, written under the tent after daytime wanderings on the crests of the great desert.”

This double approach to nature, at once rational and empathetic, comes together in Kirkeby’s paintings (merely one of the media employed by the artist, who also produces sculpture, poetry, film, and photography).