November 12, 2015

GEORG BASELITZ: MAGICIAN OF COLOURS




GEORG BASELITZ: MAGICIAN OF COLOURS




NEW PAINTINGS
In a proclamatory act in 1969, Baselitz turned the motif upside-down (acknowledging debts to Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock), thus "liberating representation from content". He now brings a further reversal: from positive to negative – with unreal colouration drawn from the photographic negative.
"The positive evidence in the image contains what it is not. The negative reveals what is reversed by what is visible – as though the greatest resource of art were to combat the visible with what is in itself invisible.  There is no doubt that we are dealing here with Photoshop, but basically there is a lot more to it: our thought-processes – the way a great painter thinks when he is determined to find painting in the place to which it leads him, whether it will or not; as the consequence of a radical optical decision for which it is responsible, whether he wishes it or not" (Eric Darragon).
The exhibition, which includes 25 works on canvas and a monumental sculpture, is divided into three groups. In one series, Baselitz refers to the well-known painting Bildnis der Eltern II [portrait of my parents] (1924) by Otto Dix (1891-1969), which is now in the collection of the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. Baselitz (who, like Otto Dix, comes from Dresden) has replaced the heads of Dix's parents with those of his own. The emphasis of the composition appears to be on the gnarled hands and the faces of the elderly couple. In a second series, Baselitz portrays his artistic predecessors, protagonists of Expressionism, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel and Edvard Munch. These portraits are reminiscent of Baselitz's early work at the beginning of the 1960s, when "the painter educes from a head or a portrait its own immanent world" (Eric Darragon). A third group contains works in which Baselitz refers to his own series of Russian Paintings (1998-2001), where he caricatures the social realist works of his youth, paraphrasing them in the style of German Expressionism. In the present sombre colouration, they seem bereft of any feigned positivity or Communist pathos.
The sculpture Sing Sang Zero (2011), a monumental double portrait, is a perfect synthesis of the cultic, fetishistic essence of African sculpture and the pathos of Expressionism. Eric Darragon aptly describes this black double figure as "the acid test of an ancient motif, dug up out of the dim and distant past like an archaeological find for a pas de deux before the eyes of Willem De Kooning".
Information had quoted  from Georg Baselitz's exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac 2015.You  may visit web page to see all paintings and entire information.

http://ropac.net/exhibition/das-negativ-new-paintings
You may visit Georg Baselitz's past exhibition news with Emilio Vedova at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac to click below link.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2015/06/georg-baselitz-emilio-vedova-at-galeri.html




DIE ARBEITERFAKULTAT VORWARTS 2012 ( DETAIL )




DIE ARBEITERFAKULTAT VORWARTS 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




DIE ARBEITERFAKULTAT VORWARTS 2012 ( DETAIL )






DIE ARBEITERFAKULTAT VORWARTS 2012 ( DETAIL )




DER BRIEF VON DER FRONT – DAS NEGATIV 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






S-R NEGATIVE 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 270 x 207 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






DREI ARBEITERSSTUDENTEN 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




DAS GELBE KLEID IST BLAU GEWORDEN 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






SOLCHE AHMUNG 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




SING SANG ZERO 2011
Bronze Patiniert
Dimensions: 329 x 195 x 103 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




ES GIBT EINE GEWISSE AHNLICHKEIT 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






DIE ARBEITERAKADEMIE MARSCHIERT 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




YELLOW SONG 2013
Patinated Bronze
Dimensions: 310.2 x 149 x 108.5 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015 




DUNKEL AGE SCHWARZIM 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






DUNKEL AGE SCHWARZIM 2012 ( DETAIL )




YELLOW SONG 2013 ( DETAIL )




DUNKEL AGE SCHWARZIM 2012 ( DETAIL )




LE COTE SOMBRE
“What is Germany, really, in regard to traditional sculpture?” In a recent interview, Baselitz looked back to questions he asked himself in the 1970s: “The last thing I could think of in the way of pleasing or characteristic German sculpture after the Gothic period was the group Die Brücke, including Schmidt - Rottluff, Kirchner and Lehmbruck. When I finally arrived at this idea, I took a piece of wood and started work” (Georg Baselitz, 2011).
Baselitz's first sculpture was shown in the German Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Since then he has made only a few.
After Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Max Ernst chose a readily malleable material when they had reached the limits of painting. Baselitz stands in this tradition of painters who leave their medium. He finds sculpture “a shorter way than painting”, to tackle certain problems; it is “more primitive, brutal, not as reserved [...] as painting can sometimes be”, and “less cryptic than pictures, far more direct, more legible” (Georg Baselitz, 1983). Besides this recourse to Expressionist sculpture, an important field of reference for Baselitz's sculpture is the fundamental nature of African sculpture, where specific basic types have been developed over a long period.
Baselitz works exclusively with wood, negating both the idea of doing justice to the material and that of the stuffy, conservative reputation of wood sculpture. “Any appealing form [..] any arty-crafty elegance or deliberate construction is taboo” (Georg Baselitz, 1987). With great physical effort, he hacks, stabs and saws the block of wood, taking no account of the grain. “For a sculpture to take shape, the wood has to be forcibly opened” (Uwe Schneede, 1993).
For the past ten years, Baselitz has cast limited editions of his wood sculptures in bronze at the long-established Hermann Noack fine art foundry in Berlin. Here the finest details of the sculpted wood are reproduced and burnished in black by the artist. On Baselitz’s black, unreflective surfaces, John-Paul Stonard remarks in his exhibition catalogue essay: “They betray the light absorbing wood from which they were originally carved; memory falls into them, rather than drama out of them.”
Georg Baselitz’s new bronzes include Sing Sang Zero, a standing couple with arms interlinked, and three fetishistic sculptures – Marokkaner, Yellow Song, Louise Fuller - showing a humanoid figure enclosed in rings. Louise Fuller is a gentle parody of the American dancer famous for her act with veils.
Information had quoted  from Georg Baselitz's exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.You  may visit web page to see all paintings and entire information.

http://ropac.net/exhibition/le-cote-sombre




YELLOW SONG 2013 ( DETAIL )




KOMPLEMENTAR BRAUNLICH 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 208 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




LOUISE FULLER 2013
Bronze, Patinated, 837 kg
Dimensions: 351.5 × 135.5 × 130 cm
Edition of 6
© Georg Baselitz 2015
 



MAL SO, MAL SO – POLYOPIE 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 290 x 207 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
 





ELKE NEGATIV BLAU 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 280 x 207 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




SPAZIERGANG OHNE STOCK
"I carry on working. Just as in the past people have not understood my pictures, they do not understand my later works, either. This is simply how it is: people don't understand that even an old artist can still develop."
Edvard Munch, 1933
"By the repetition of a basic problem, we understand the opening-up of its original, long concealed possibilities, through the working-out of which it is transformed. In this way it first comes to be preserved in its capacity as a problem. To preserve a problem, however, means to free and keep watch over those inner forces which make it possible, on the basis of its essence, as a problem."
Martin Heidegger, 1929
Georg Baselitz, who lives and works in Derneburg and Imperia. It includes two monumental bronze sculptures, seven large-scale oil paintings and nine watercolours.
A central theme of these works is an intensive study of the artistic methods employed by Edvard Munch (1863-1944). This Norwegian symbolist, impressionist and later expressionist, whose succès de scandale in 1890s Berlin influenced the entire secessionist art of the period, contributed largely to shaping German expressionism.
In 1916, Munch purchased an estate in Ekely, near Oslo, where he lived until his death. The name Ekely means "in the shelter of the oaks" – and in this haven Munch painted pictures free of all stylistic constraints and models, characterised by an untypical colouration, freedom of brushwork, and themes geared to his immediate surroundings.
In his new series, Baselitz synthesises Munch's later liberal style with motifs referring to his own origins in Deutschbaselitz and to memories from his childhood. In 2001 Baselitz wrote: "I think it's time to take up my old stuff again, my childhood drawings and things I did at school [...] Using something you haven't yet lost is pleasanter, and as long as you're doing that, it isn't important whether the motif is the same as it was then." Thus some of his new works hark back to the small oil painting Sandteichdamm [sand pond dam], which Baselitz painted at school in 1955, when he was about seventeen, and which shows the immediate surroundings of the house where he was born. The motif is transformed into a sort of negative-painting, with which Baselitz has recently been attempting to produce pictures that look like negatives.
A further leitmotif in Baselitz's new works is a fragment of leg, especially of a foot (sometimes in a shoe). Feet have long played an important role in his work; in 1960-1963 he painted naked, battered, pandemoniac feet. In his new works, the foot (shoe) Рwhich has become a tradition within Modernism since G̩ricault's fragmented feet, van Gogh's Peasant Shoes and Andy Warhol's pre-pop drawings and Diamond Dust Shoes Рhas assumed an autobiographical connotation. It becomes a kind of self-portrait, as a pars pro toto.
"In the motifs of tree and leg, Baselitz is constantly confronting – with shifting accents – the existential pair of opposites: staying and going; fixing and movement; standing and falling; obviously stably centred existence and being on the move (which always entails the danger of disorientation); the duration and the passing of existence. Having feet means having no roots. Baselitz creates an imagery of farewell, of departure, of homelessness, of destabilisation – though usually with no outward sign of dynamism or reference to movement." (Kirsten Klaudia Voigt)

http://ropac.net/exhibition/spaziergang-ohne-stock
Information had quoted  from Georg Baselitz's exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.You  may visit web page to see all paintings and entire information.




EKELY 2004
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 200 x 162 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




PIE FIGHT INTERIOR 11 - 2014
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 280 x 230 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




UNTITLED 2012
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 50 x 40 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




ROSSO '84 - 1984
Paint on Canvas
Dimensions: 235 x 235 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




UNTITLED 2013
India Ink and Washed Ink on Paper
Dimensions: 50.7 x 65.7 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015












GEORG BASELITZ' S STUDIO




































GEORG BASELITZ' S STUDIO












MODERNER MALER 2007
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 × 250 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




UNTITLED 1979-1980
Dimensions: 65 × 39 × 42 cm
Image Provided by Fondation Beyeler
© Georg Baselitz 2015




UNTITLED 2015
Ink Pen, and India Ink on Paper
Dimensions: In Two Parts, Left: 66.1 × 50.9 cm; Right: 65.7 × 50 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo by Jochen Littkemann, Berlin




UNTITLED 2015
Ink Pen, Watercolor, and India Ink on Paper
Dimensions: In two parts, left: 66.8 × 51 cm; right: 66.9 × 50.9 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo by Jochen Littkemann, Berlin




UNTITLED 2015
Ink Pen, Lavis, and India Ink on Paper
Dimensions: In Two Parts, Left: 67.2 × 51.3 cm; Right: 66.4 × 50.9 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo by Jochen Littkemann, Berlin




UNTITLED 2015
Ink Pen, Watercolor, and India Ink on Paper
Dimensions: In Two Parts, Left: 66.3 × 50.8 cm; Right: 66.2 × 50.9 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo by Jochen Littkemann, Berlin




WINTERSCHLAF 2014
Patinated Bronze
Dimensions: 159 x 378.5 x 140 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo © Jochen Littkemann, Berlin Courtesy White Cube




SONO SCURO 2010
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250 x 200 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




MONUMENTAL SCULPTURES, PAINTINGS
“ Folk Thing Zero and Dunklung Nachtung Amung Ding – words juxtaposed, words laden with meaning evoking works from the past, Beckettian words pronounced in an act of recall, an obsessive speculation. A nostalgia in search of vision rather than pretty words or dreams.
Georg Baselitz’s recent monumental sculptures, a new series of striking paintings, as well as works on paper in our Drawing Space.
Baselitz’s first sculpture, Modell für eine Skulptur ( Model for a Sculpture ) dates from 1979 and was shown at the 1980 Venice Biennale.  Thirty years later, the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden paid tribute to the artist’s sculptural practice. As with his paintings, his forceful sculptures reject all forms of harmony and symmetry in favor of inventiveness visible through elemental forms and jagged lines.
Both sculptures, Volk Ding Zero and Dunklung Nachtung Amung Ding remind us of an earlier work from 2003 titled Meine neue Mütze ( My New Cap ), also monumental in its scale, in which the standing figure is wearing a white cap, blue shorts and chunky black shoes. Whereas this sculpture is toy-like and almost comical, these two new self-portraits adopt a contemplative attitude, imbued with memories of the past. Here again, the white cap is present, this time with the word “Zero” marked on its front, similar to the white fabric baseball cap Georg Baselitz wears while working, but resembling more to a square pimpf cap from the war years. Just as the artist begins from zero with every work, he also unearths the past. In his catalogue essay, Darragon explains, “Zero signifies the ability to achieve something by destroying or effacing whatever might stand in its way. Zero also means the German artist he eventually became...Panadämonium was a first leap below zero. Since then the artist has proceeded by leaps and bounds, ‘The leap forward is also the look back’.”[2]
In conjunction with these sculptures, we will show six new paintings of inverted nude figures, portrayed headless, painted on a black background with a contrasting palette of pink, orange, blue, green and white. Reminiscent of naked figure studies or evoking the prehistoric headless Venuses, these astonishing works continue to vacillate between figuration and abstraction, in the artist’s own fleeting and spontaneous style.
Information had quoted  from Georg Baselitz's exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.You  may visit web page to see all paintings and entire information.

http://ropac.net/exhibition/monumental-sculptures-paintings




SONO SCURO 2010 ( DETAIL )




ACH MADCHEN OH 2010
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250 x 200 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




ACH, MADCHEN GRUN 2010
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250 x 200 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




DUNKLUNG NACHTUNG AMUNG DING 2009
Wood, Oil Paint
Dimensions: 308 x 120 x 125 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




FOLK THING ZERO 2009
Wood, Oil Paint, Paper, Nails
Dimensions: 308 x 120 x 125 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






MANTEL 2014
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 × 207 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




BITTE HINTER DEN KOPF 2014
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 × 207 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




FRANK KOMMT NACH HAUS 2014
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 × 207 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




SIGMUNDS HÖHLE 2000
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250 x 200 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




G. – KOPF 1987
. Rotbuche und Ölfarbe,
Dimensions: 99 x 65,50 x 58,50 cm.
Ludwig Museum Budapest
© Georg Baselitz 2015




WITTELSBACHER SCHWAN 2000
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 162 x 130 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




SENTIMENTAL HOLLAND 1996.
Lindenholz und Ölfarbe,
Dimensions: 207 x 93,50 x 79,50 cm.
Sammlung Ströher, Dortmund
© Georg Baselitz 2015




ANNALISES SCHATTEN 2000
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 159 x 120 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




BUBENSCHNEIDEN I - 1998
Öl auf Leinwand
Dimensions: 146 x 114 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




KNABEN V - 1998
Öl auf Leinwand
Dimensions: 200 x 162 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




KNABEN III - 1998
Öl auf Leinwand
Dimensions: 200 x 162 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015










UNTITLED, 25.IV.87 – 1987




WATERCOLOURS
To mark the 20th anniversary of German reunification, the Axel Springer publishing company invited Baselitz to fill the entire edition of the newspaper Die Welt with his works. On 1 October 2010 there appeared, in place of illustrations, a series of pictures by Baselitz on the theme of German reunification.
For Georg Baselitz, who grew up in East Germany and went over to the "free" west to study painting, the fall of the wall and the reunification of Germany constituted a dramatic turning-point which found expression in his art. He felt his collaboration with Axel Springer as a welcome new opportunity to position his art on this theme in a medium unfamiliar to him, and to confront readers with his works. "I find it extremely perplexing, amusing and positive, that the whole format of a newspaper should be turned upside-down to make room for a picture completely detached from the story." Asked whether his works comment on the content of the article, he said: "I'm an artist, not an illustrator. I don't comment on the story - I'm part of it."
With this series, Baselitz broke away completely and strikingly from traditional watercolour technique, with fine graphic lines and rough splashes of colour and black paint running down the pictures like a dark curtain, symbolising the flow of time or perhaps general instability. The explosive style of his "typical German art" always represents brutality in history; this makes it appropriate for the theme of the fall of the wall.

Information had quoted  from Georg Baselitz's exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.You  may visit web page to see all paintings and entire information.

http://ropac.net/exhibition/watercolours




SEID BEREIT, IMMER BEREIT 2010
Tuschfeder und Tusche auf Papier
Dimensions: 66.8 x 50.5 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




SEID BEREIT, IMMER BEREIT 2010
Tuschfeder und Tusche auf Papier
Dimensions: 66.7 x 50.2 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




UNTITLED 2011
Tuschfeder, Aquarell und Tusche auf Papier
Dimensions: 66.2 x 50.5 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




IN LONDON WAR NICHTS ZU SEHEN 2011
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 215 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo © Jochen Littkemann, Berlin Courtesy White Cube




IN LONDON SCHRITT FUR SCHRITT 2011
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 180 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo © Jochen Littkemann, Berlin Courtesy White Cube




IN LONDON NICHT, ABER IN AARHUS SCHON 2011
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 206 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo © Jochen Littkemann, Berlin Courtesy White Cube




IN LONDON NICHT, VIELLEICHT IN GLASGOW 2011
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 215 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015
Photo © Jochen Littkemann, Berlin Courtesy White Cube




STERNBILD 2009
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 230 x 160 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






AHMUNG  2009
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 250 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






MONDLICHT 2009
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250 x 200 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015




MONDUNG 2009
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250 x 200 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






KULAKENTROSTUNG 2009
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250 x 200 cm
© Georg Baselitz 2015






AUCH WIRT LERN HELMT MICH ( ABLE FWILL RED ) 2013
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 × 275 cm
© Georg Baselitz. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Photography by Jochen Littkemann


















GEORG BASELITZ
Painter, sculptor, printmaker and draughtsman, Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most celebrated living artists, with a distinguished career spanning over fifty years.
Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938, he grew up in Saxony, an area that later became East Germany. Whilst studying painting at the Academy of Art in East Berlin (1956) he was sent down after one year for political immaturity‘. He then applied at the Academy in West Berlin and moved there in 1958, completing his studies in 1962. During this period he adopted the surname Baselitz, reflecting his place of birth Deutschbaselitz.
In searching for alternatives to the strongly narrative art of Social Realism and abstract painting, he became interested in art considered to be outside of the mainstream of Modernism. He began to look to Ferdinand v. Rayski, Michail Wrubel amomgst others and imagery that was rooted in the Art Brut. He was also inspired by Existentialist art and literature (Fautrier, Beckett, Ionesco, Artaud), by Dada (Schwitters, Picabia) and the works of the German authors Nietzsche and Gottfried Benn.
In 1963 Baselitz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal and several paintings were confiscated by the German authorities claiming that they were publicly indecent. Among them Die grosse Nacht im Eimer (‘The Big Night Down the Drain’), which depicted a masturbating dwarf-like figure. By the mid-1960s, Baselitz embarked on a series of paintings depicting monumental male figures, which he described as Rebels, Shepherds or New Types (‘Ein neuer Typ’). Viewed within the Romantic tradition, the rebel (or hero/partisan) is often regarded as an outsider associated with the figure of the artist. These paintings are often termed as the ‘Hero’ (‘Helden’) series and were prompted after Baselitz’s scholarship in Florence in 1965, where he became interested in Italian Mannerist prints. Baselitz depicted his figures located within mythical, ruined landscapes, each with symbolic attributes to identify their individual characters, such as army boots, knapsacks or uniform jackets, often with exaggerated and exposed sexual organs. The lone figure as a prophet or saint also alludes to home coming soldiers stumbling, dazed, through battle-scarred post-war Germany.
The ‘Fracture’ paintings of the late 1960s revealed Baselitz’s keen interest in forests and trees (and the motifs that have historically been associated with them, with rural landscapes peopled with woodsmen and hunters). They were divided into segments so that the imagery could be reorganised pictorially. In 1969, he decided to create and display work upside down in order to re-focus the viewer on the pure pictorial merits of the painting. By attempting to overcome the representational, content-driven character of his earlier work, this also enabled him to emphasise the abstract qualities of the composition.
By the late 1970s, he was making monumental sculptures of figures and heads with rudimentary and deliberately irregular forms. He used wood, he said, because “it enables avoidance of any attractiveness of form, any craft or elegance … objects in wood are unique, simple, unpretentious”. Having spent most of the early 1970s apparently working outside the mainstream, dominated at the time by Conceptual Art practice, by the 1980s he had established his international reputation (cemented by exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in 1980 and ‘A New Spirit in Painting’ in 1981). During the 1980s and early 1990s, the canvases became denser and more heavily worked, and subject matter returned to play a greater role. He began introducing motifs from Slavic folk art, sometimes combining motifs with figures of family members taken from old photographs. The styles of German Romanticism inspired his more recent work and he even addressed works created in the Socialist Realism of Stalin’s era (which he rejected so forcefully at the beginning of his career). In 2005 Baselitz introduced the ‘Remix’ in his work, in which he has returned to key phases of his own art history (including ‘ The Big Night Down the Drain’ and ‘The Great Friends’) and made new versions of his work. They are painted intuitively, with quick and spontaneous flashes of bright, transparent colour. References to the Nazi leader Hitler, which in the earlier works had been more ambiguous, are more directly emphasised. These works have allowed Baselitz to revisit and excavate the past, pushing his own painterly vocabulary to create works that are fresh and liberated.
Baselitz has exhibited widely including major solo shows at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014), Albertina, Vienna (2013), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2011), Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2010), Galerie Neue Meister und Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister der Staatlichen Kunstsammlung Dresden (2009), Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2009), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples (2008), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007), Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen (2006), Musée d'Art de la Ville de Paris (1997) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1995).

http://whitecube.com/artists/georg_baselitz/