Internationally he is known for his colorful, heavily textured and layered abstract oil paintings of landscapes, large-scale works that earned him his breakthrough in the 1990s — and a belated recognition that Siegfried Gohr, the curator of Kirkeby’s 2012 retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, has termed a späternte, or “late harvest.”

Throughout his expectation-defying career, Kirkeby has also been a geologist, poet, sculptor, and filmmaker. He has always been allergic to routine and convention. But with his recent painterly interventions on Masonite board, which echo pieces made but little noticed in the 1960s, the artist is pondering whether he’s finally found his groove — and whether that is a good thing. A cross-section of Kirkeby’s paintings and sculptures are currently on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., through January 6, 2013, the most extensive U.S. survey of his work to date. Nicolai Hartvig visited Kirkeby’s home studio in the leafy Copenhagen neighborhood of Hellerup, where the artist discussed going color-blind and the intangibility of Fluxus, among other things.

To see images of Kirkeby's work, click on the slideshow. 

Tell me what you’ve been working on recently.

Not too long ago, I decided to no longer paint my boards black. They have a beautiful golden tone and I wanted to paint directly on that, as if it were paper. It was great. I discovered that I could draw figures and landscapes, distribute the colors in different ways, and use a varnish that I just dripped on there. And I noticed that they resembled my works from the 1960s, which some have been surprised to see in my recent large exhibitions at Tate Modern and the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Suddenly I was no longer bound to do a solid painting, I could put anything in it and tell stories like I did in the old days. It was a terrific freedom. The works were really good. They sold well. And then came the problem.

There has always been a yearning in my work to not be pigeonholed, to do something a bit unexpected. And I realized that perhaps I was returning to an old pattern. I had a model, a grip. This frightened me, filled me with panic and a certain despair.

Because you don’t want to settle?

At my age, you realize that some things have caught you. You can see that as a positive or a negative. On the negative side: Are you in a routine, unconsciously adapting to things that work well? Or on the positive side: Is this merely you, what you have in your kit, the structures that constitute you? If so, then that would be all right. When I worry about following up work that has been successful, as with these latest paintings, I have sculpture. I’ve made a couple in the past two years — they’re pretty far out, and I don’t know how they came to be. Right now, sculpture is the place where I cannot be caught. It has become my free space, which I keep for myself. The black Masonite filled that role for many years. But recently, by not painting them black and instead making them beautiful, I’ve wondered if I have sold that particular idea. Edvard Munch, as he got older, sat at his home and painted like a wild man. Those works were not very popular and have come to be considered the “wrong” Munch. But that’s how you need to be when you get old. I call it the arrogance of age: You don’t need recognition. You just don’t care.

You have also returned to some of the signature elements of your older paintings, like the outline of a cave.

I’ve done that for many years. Georg Baselitz goes back to his serious works and liberally mistreats them. For me it is a rückbild, or a look back, where I would create paintings without lightening them, using components from my earlier works. Like the hut, for example. In the 1980s, when I decided to begin to paint in oil on canvas in the great European tradition — a decisive turning point for me — there was an openness and an incertitude to the work. Each painting was different, and that is what I wanted. But through the 1990s I developed signatures, somewhat radical and unmistakably mine. Francis Picabia remains my hero. The more you dive into his work, the wilder it becomes. He painted the skewed Cubist paintings that we all know. Then came the kitsch works. And he ended up doing these strange, abstract works that are impossible to grasp. Whenever you think you’ve got him, he’s always moved along. That’s what I aspire to do.

Picabia was also a link between you and your gallerist, Michael Werner.

Yes. Michael found me, God knows how. He had indeed started collecting Picabia. At the time, it cost him a yearly lunch with the artist’s widow. Michael has played a colossal role for me, most of all through his incomprehensible brutality. He has the ability to point out the weakest spots. He kept me low in the gallery hierarchy for many years, which I was happy about.

Michael often came to see my work. He walks like a cowboy. He would look, grunt, and say that it was a complete miss, that he couldn’t use it. Which was actually good, since it forced me to think whether the work truly was a miss — and if so, whether it was something that I still wanted to hold on to. With an outside gaze, I also begin to see the weak points, the places where I’ve skipped ahead and things have gotten too easy. So I begin again.