PRESENTATION 

The German painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz is one of the most important figures in contemporary art.
Baselitz is born in 1938 in a rural region of Saxony which became part of the German Democratic Republic in 1949 but receives his artistic education in the West Berlin of the second World War. The artistic output of Georg Baselitz has made a significant contribution to the renewal of figurative painting; it is permeated by a constant need to rework its subjects and since 1969 it has been characterised by the inversion of image. With this gesture of unquestionable subversive impact, Baselitz not only enters another expressive dimension but also leaves an indelible mark on the history of art of the last four decades.
He has projected the motif into a new spatial perspective, forcing the viewer to read the objective datum through a disorienting linguistic device and mirror-like reflection where the work maintains a state of constant tension between abstraction/figuration and construction/destruction of the painted image.
The reality represented in his paintings is not recognisable reality but its distorted shadow, unquestionably altered by the presence of an ‘upside-down world’ but also by the pictorial handling and the way in which the image is placed on the canvas. The choice of themes is not dictated by a direct relationship with the objective world, but rather mediated through its representation. This can take the form of a photograph or the work of another artist, but is triggered above all by memories regarding the artist’s personal history, family circle and friends.
With over one hundred works, comprising paintings, wood sculptures, monumental engravings and drawings, the exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s entire journey from the earliest works up to the most recent Remix series. Curator Rainer Michael Mason has opted for a thematic display with the open intention of highlighting the artist’s most cherished subjects and motifs, already reworked and now taken up again within the framework of an open-ended process of constant expansion, enrichment and reformulation.
The exhibition adopts the scholarly approach developed at the time of the monographic show organized in 2006 by the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne, whose contribution has proved crucial to the success of the present event. In addition to the works exhibited on that occasion, most of which are drawn from the artist’s own collection, others have been lent by museums and private collections. Most importantly, the chronological span has been extended to include paintings and drawings dating from last year.
The beginnings of his career are here illustrated by the series of the Idole, the Helden and the Frakturbilder together with their reinterpretation in the recent Remix works. The exhibition features works related to his major series and themes: the Orangenesser, the Motiv, the portraits of his wife Elke, the self-portraits and landscapes. The most recent production is well represented by the Russenbilder, the Cowboys and works such as the large canvas Wir Besuchen den Rhein. His sculptural production, always permeated by a tribal aura, is here represented by a selection of violently carved wood sculptures such as the monumental Frau Paganismus or Dersdner Frauen - Die Elbe. This significant set of works allows the viewer to discover the formal solutions through which Georg Baselitz expresses his particular relationship with painting and his own lived experience

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