“It’s always about Eros and Thanatos. Death and life, these are the topics I talk about,” the artist Berlinde De Bruyckere told the Paris Review in 2016. In her grayed, flayed, often deeply disfigured or decomposed sculptures, this life-and-death dichotomy resonates. The works impose themselves like living creatures, yet possess an eerie, haunted quality. In a new exhibition—the first of an annual event called “Evergreen,” which presents contemporary artists in dialogue with masters from the past—De Bruyckere’s work speaks to paintings from the 17th century to the 1960s, from Francesco Botti to Salvatore Sciarpitta. —E.C.