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.
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.
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) – which has become a tradition within Modernism since Géricault's fragmented feet, van Gogh's Peasant Shoes and Andy Warhol's pre-pop drawings and Diamond Dust Shoes – has 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)
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) – which has become a tradition within Modernism since Géricault's fragmented feet, van Gogh's Peasant Shoes and Andy Warhol's pre-pop drawings and Diamond Dust Shoes – has 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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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/
