Per Kirkeby’s primal colour palette and signature freedom of line come together in this sprawling landscape painted in 2006 during the final decade of the artist’s career. Kirkeby’s rhythmic variety of line evokes the dance of branches in the wind, the frenzy of vivid green vegetation and an entanglement of increasingly calligraphic tree roots, water channels and rocky formations that meet the viewer’s eye as it moves down the canvas and descends into a subterranean world. Kirkeby was a landscape painter like no other. He looked beyond the surface of nature to visually excavate the earth and discover its abstract patterns, relentlessly seeking a means to harness what he saw as the ‘unfathomable chaos’ of the world around us.

A dominant presence in late 20th-century Scandinavian art, Kirkeby represented Denmark in the 1976 Venice Biennale. While long deserving to rank alongside modern masters including Edvard Munch, Kirkeby’s name has only been cemented internationally within the last 20 years. This dynamic landscape of 2006 was shown as part of Kirkeby’s landmark retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2008, marking the artist’s 70th birthday, before Tate held a major solo exhibition the following year.

Kirkeby’s genius comes from the extraordinary reach of his career, which journeyed through ties to the Fluxus movement, Pop Art and Neo-Expressionism. While predominantly identifying as a painter, he was also a sculptor, filmmaker, ballet set-designer, poet, art writer and geologist. Key to his mature work as a landscape painter is his beginnings as a student of natural history and geology. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kirkeby undertook many expeditions to Greenland, where he would observe the geography in the morning and draw in the afternoon. It was here that he discovered ‘nature’s lack of constancy’ and established a geological approach to painting based on the ‘depositing of thin, thin layers’. ‘I think of my paintings as a summation of structure’, Kirkeby later wrote, ‘in principle, an endless process of sedimentation’. Liberated from the traditional rules of perspective, Kirkeby’s 2006 landscape holds an overwhelming stacked materiality. In the words of Poul Erik Tøjner, ‘it is as if we are looking right down into the compost’.

Kirkeby was scrawling into notebooks throughout his life, and in 2006, the year this landscape was painted, he published his third drawing diary, DAGBOG III. Kirkeby described his sketches as ‘crystallized forms’ – pieces of nature preserved. His working method echoed that of many landscape painters before him including JMW Turner, who similarly filled his many sketchbooks with compositional studies. Kirkeby was inspired by Turner’s ability to create vast space through colour and light but, vital to the Scandinavian artist’s mastery, the calligraphic line retains its autonomy through to the finished painting, in which the system of vertical daubs, cross-hatching and twisting marks provides the work’s internal structure. The result is a series of horizontal bands emulating layered rock strata.

Kirkeby’s ecological curiosity is evident in the recycling of descriptive features and abstract gestures across his entire oeuvre. One of his visual signatures is the form resembling a keyhole, funnel, or hourglass – in each case, propelling a downward movement – seen on the titlepage of DAGBOG III and buried within the earth of his 2006 landscape.