GEORG BASELITZ: THE COMPASS POINTS NORTH AT THADDAEUS ROPAC PANTIN PARIS
JANUARY 22. 2023 – MAY 27, 2023
La boussole indique le nord is an exhibition of recent works
by internationally renowned German artist Georg Baselitz. Filling the gallery’s
Paris Pantin space, the exhibition brings together five series realised between
2020 and 2021, in celebration of the artist’s 85th birthday. The works on view
span Tulips with pared-back compositions and contrasting colours, three series
of portraits with vivid palettes, and a series of more melancholy portraits on
dark backgrounds. The works on canvas are accompanied by a group of ink
drawings. Characterised by an unprecedented integration of fabric and by a
transfer method that marks a significant recent development in Baselitz’s
technique, the works create, both conceptually and materially, a distinctive
universe where the logic of collage coalesces with painting.
Baselitz’s wife Elke has been a constant subject of the
artist’s work throughout his career, ever since he first painted her in 1969.
Showing her from the waist up, her head resting on her hand, the group of new
portraits in the exhibition pays homage to Baselitz’s very first depiction of
her, which is today part of the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York. Those from 2021 also feature a new element in Baselitz’s visual
vocabulary: a disjointed pair of nylon stockings affixed to the upside-down
portrait of Elke, like fragile, disembodied legs. Existing on a different plane
to the oil-painted figures, they give the canvases a third dimension, expanding
them into the realm of collage to evoke the work of German Dadaist Hannah Höch,
who employed cut-out legs to construct mismatched bodies in her pioneering
photocollages. Interviewed in the NZZ am Sonntag in 2022, Baselitz said: ‘Some
two years ago I remembered Hannah Höch and her stocking pictures. I had never
dared to make collages before. I found the technique wonderful. But the
question was: how could I use this technique in my painting? Then I had a dream
about the stockings.’
With a touch of playfulness, the stockings recall the feet
and legs that have been a recurring theme since the artist’s very early works.
For Baselitz, they are the symbol of a tactile connection with the earth: the
same connection he fosters by working with his canvases on the floor.
Interviewed by Martin Schwander in 2017, Baselitz explained that, as a
‘north-of-the-Alps man’, his contact does not reach heavenward: ‘The
Mediterranean peoples [...] told us about angels in Heaven. I don’t believe in
that. So, when I’m painting on the floor, the contact downward – feeling for
what is under it – is really important.’ As the artist added in 2021, ‘people
living north of the Alps are in search of their own story’, grounded in their
own earthy mythology. The exhibition, whose title translates as The Compass
Points North, might be viewed in light of this reflection.
As if in defiance of the ambiguous sensuality of the
garment, the empty stockings on view seem to confront us with absence. This
sense of evanescence is mirrored in the sparsity of the painted surfaces among
the works in the exhibition, which contrast with the dense impasto for which
Baselitz has long been known. Across the works on view, the artist uses a
monotype printing technique he has developed in recent years. He paints the
composition onto a piece of unstretched canvas before pressing a second canvas
against it while wet, to create a mirror-image impression. Here, compared to
previous works, Baselitz’s ‘figures dissolve more and more’, remarks art critic
Gerhard Mack. ‘The colour becomes transparent [and the] figures are almost
floating, porous’.
Baselitz takes his monotype technique a step further in his
intensely chromatic portraits with stockings, transferring the figure of Elke
onto a piece of fabric which he then affixes to the canvas. Allowing the
creases of the fabric to mirror the delicate folds of skin, this unprecedented
technique brings to mind the imprint left by Christ’s body on the Shroud of
Turin. Impregnated with her form, the printed fabric implies an imagined
contact with Elke’s body, turning painting into, as art historian Philippe
Dagen writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, ‘not an image [...]
but the material manifestation of a presence’. The disarming corporeal intimacy
this creates is echoed in the delicate depictions of Elke found in the group of
ink drawings on view, in which slight outlines wind across the exposed paper
like veins laid bare. Across the exhibition, Baselitz associates this bodily
vitality, expressed through jubilant colour and gestural energy, with the
fragility of his representation of a beloved figure in all her vulnerability,
to create portraits in which vigour is tempered with tenderness.
The exhibition is dominated by the vibrant palette of the
portraits in effervescent colours on white grounds, as well as those painted on
powder blue. The latter evoke the blue backgrounds of German Renaissance
painter Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portraits, as well as the cyan environments
characteristic of Pablo Picasso’s Surrealist nudes from the 1920s and 30s,
bearing witness to Baselitz’s constant engagement with the history of painting.
Such bursts of works in intense colour are always matched in the artist’s
practice by periods in which a more subdued palette dominates. The series of
monumental canvases on impenetrable backgrounds of black brushstrokes bears
witness to this duality.
On these darker works, Baselitz transfers the same monotype
figure twice in a composition that references Picasso’s L’Aubade. In this
melancholy 1942 painting, Picasso took a sombre approach to the traditional
female nude, which Baselitz alludes to in his own take on the theme. As
Philippe Dagen writes, in each of Baselitz’s works, the first impression of the
figure depletes the paint for the second impression, so that it is ‘stripped of
a part of its substance, the second painting being like the ghost of the
first’. With this monotype technique, Dagen continues, the artist brings the
paint ‘to a point close to exhaustion and disappearance,’ a visual effect that
embodies the sensitivity of his approach to painting Elke.
Since the early 2000s, Baselitz has been returning to the
key phases and motifs of his own past oeuvre in a series of paintings known as
Remix. The Tulips on view in the exhibition are a remix of the flowers he
painted at the very beginning of the 1980s. In this group of works, the subject
leans in from the left of the canvas to interact with the emptier right side.
This creates a taut relationship between subject and background and a
compositional equilibrium that, in the words of Diane Waldman, curator of
Baselitz’s 1995 retrospective at The Guggenheim in New York, ‘recalls the
balanced asymmetry that Piet Mondrian achieved in his Compositions of the 1920s
and 1930s’. Baselitz titles these paintings, whose floral subjects are
themselves inextricably linked with the Dutch Old Master tradition, ‘Greetings
from Holland’, ‘If Piet had stayed in the country’ or ‘Piet has gone to NY’. In
doing so, he evokes Mondrian’s journey from the Netherlands to the USA, and
corresponding transition from figuration to abstraction. It is this space
between the two traditional poles of painting that Baselitz has navigated
throughout his career, confronting them at times, at others circumventing them
to forge his own singular path.
According to museum curator Bernard Blistène, Baselitz
‘works from the very conventions of painting, and yet [is] perhaps the painter
who has most destroyed these conventions.’ This has been the case since he
first inverted a canvas, a compositional play he has now been employing for
more than 50 years. In the new works, through previously untried experiments
with collage and novel mark-making techniques, it is the conventions of
painting’s materiality that Baselitz tests, bringing his innovation up to the
threshold of his 85th birthday. Yet the layers of allusion and material, and
the destabilisation of representation and narrative that they imply, never
alienate the painter from his work. Instead, they serve as an invitation for
the viewer to bypass the ‘sterile questions’ of representation within painting.
As the artist says: ‘they make it possible for me to realise what I have wanted
all my life.’
La boussole indique le nord will be accompanied by an
exhibition catalogue with a text by Philippe Dagen.
YOUNG MAN STOCKINGS, 2021
Oil,
Dispersion Adhesive and Nylon Stockings on Canvas
Dimensions: 480 x 300 cm
© Georg
Baselitz.
WIRFT DIE
FRAU DEN STEIN? I, 2020
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250
x 300 cm
© Georg
Baselitz. Photos: Jochen Littkemann
SUMIS AL RE
RUS, 2020
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 250
x 300 cm
© Georg
Baselitz. Photos: Jochen Littkemann
DER KOMPASS
ZEIGT NACH NORDEN, 2021
Oil,
Dispersion Adhesive, Fabric and Nylon Stocking on Canvas
Dimensions: 300
x 210 cm
© Georg
Baselitz. Photos: Jochen Littkemann
DAS IST AUCH EIN WEG, 2021
Oil,
Dispersion Adhesive, Fabric and Nylon Stocking on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 210 cm
© Georg
Baselitz.
DAS GRAS IST FESTGETRETEN, 2021
Oil,
Dispersion Adhesive, Fabric and Nylon Stocking on Canvas
Dimensions: 300
x 210 cm
© Georg
Baselitz.
WENN PIET IM LANDE GEBLIEBEN WAR, 2020
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300
x 230 cm
© Georg Baselitz.
Baselitz titles these paintings, whose floral subjects are
themselves inextricably linked with the Dutch Old Master tradition, ‘Greetings
from Holland’, ‘If Piet had stayed in the country’ or ‘Piet is gone, to NY’. In
doing so, he evokes Mondrian’s journey from the Netherlands to the USA, and
corresponding transition from figuration to abstraction. It is this space
between the two traditional poles of painting that Baselitz has navigated
throughout his career, confronting them at times, at others circumventing them
to forge his own singular path.
GRUß AUS HOLLAND, 2020
Oil
on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 230 cm
© Georg
Baselitz.
Since the early 2000s, Baselitz has been returning to the key phases and motifs of his own past oeuvre in a series of paintings known as Remix. The Tulips on view in the exhibition are a remix of the flowers he painted at the very beginning of the 1980s. In this group of works, the subject leans in from the left of the canvas to interact with the emptier right side to create a taut relationship between subject and background and a compositional equilibrium reminiscent of the balanced asymmetry of Piet Mondrian.
WO IST DIE
GITARRE, 2021
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300
x 420 cm
© Georg
Baselitz. Photos: Jochen Littkemann
OHNE TITEL,
2020
Ink and
Watercolour on Paper
Dimensions: 50,7
x 65,9 cm
© Georg
Baselitz. Photos: Jochen Littkemann
DIE GITARRE SCHWEIGT, 2021
Oil
on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 420 cm
© Georg
Baselitz.
OHNE TITEL,
2020
Ink and
Watercolour on Paper
Dimensions: 51
x 67 cm
© Georg
Baselitz. Photos: Jochen Littkemann
IS NEE MUSS NEE, 2020
Oil
on Canvas
Dimensions: 300 x 250 cm
© Georg
Baselitz.
SURNEE RENEE ALNEE, 2020
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300
x 250 cm
© Georg
Baselitz.
MENTI SENTI,
2020
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 300
x 250 cm
© Georg
Baselitz. Photos: Jochen Littkemann
ABOUT GEORG BASELITZ
Georg Baselitz has had a profound influence on international
art since 1960 and is indisputably one of the most important artists of our
time. He shaped a new identity for German art in the second half of the 20th
century; in reaction to the trauma and tragedy of the Second World War, he
developed an artistic vocabulary which draws on the work of his forebears,
whilst remaining unique and wholly individualistic. Since then, Baselitz has
constantly renewed his practice through formal developments, drawing upon art
history and his own extensive oeuvre, never allowing himself to become
restricted by a single, identifiable style.
Baselitz has been painting his compositions upside down
since 1969. This novel format was a way for him to empty form of its content,
navigate between abstraction and figuration, and revolutionise a medium that
was then regarded as irredeemably conventional. His directly tactile method of
painting with his fingers in the 1970s encouraged a freer use of colour and
material that would come to the fore in his expressionist colour fields of the
1980s. This was a seminal decade for the artist, opening with his selection to
represent Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale alongside Anselm Kiefer, which
marked his first foray into sculpture.
The urge towards constant innovation has been present
throughout Baselitz’s career, as in the Remix Paintings he has been creating
since the 2000s that re-examine the iconography of past works. By revisiting
his own motifs and integrating subtle references to art history, Baselitz
offers a reflection on the significance of painting itself. Asked about this
self-referentiality, he stated: ‘I kept sinking into myself, and everything I
do is being pulled out of myself.’ In recent works that feature the figures of
the artist and his wife Elke, Baselitz engages in the struggle of
representation, the inescapability of subjectivity, and the representation of
the self through a significant other.
Baselitz, who has worked with the gallery for over 20 years,
lives between three different locations: Lake Ammersee in Bavaria, Salzburg,
and Imperia in Liguria, Italy. Early in his career, his work was included in
documenta 5 (1972) and 7 (1982). Following the 1980 Venice Biennale, he
participated in a series of influential exhibitions: A New Spirit in Painting
(1981) and German Art in the Twentieth Century (1985) at the Royal Academy of
Arts, London; and Zeitgeist (1982) at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, presented his first comprehensive
retrospective in 1995, which toured to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; and Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Further
significant retrospectives were organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris,
in 1996, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2007. In 2006 and 2007, the
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and the Albertina, Vienna, were the first to
present his Remix cycle.
A retrospective of Baselitz’s sculptures was held at the
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2011–12) and his Avignon series was presented at
the Venice Biennale in 2015. His Heldenbilder (Hero Paintings) and Neue Typen
(New Types) were shown at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2016), travelling to
the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; and Guggenheim
Bilbao. To mark the artist’s 80th birthday in 2018, comprehensive solo
exhibitions were held at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Hirshhorn Museum,
Washington, D.C.; and Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France. In 2019, he was
elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and became the first living
artist to have an exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, followed
by his largest retrospective to date at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2021–22.
