ART CITIES:BILBAO-Georg Baselitz

Soldiers, shepherds, rebels, guerrilla fighters, and modern painters are the “Heroes” and “New Types” that Georg Baselitz produced in a burst of intensely solitary expressive productivity. Painted with vigorous brushwork where colors, lines, and figures rival each other in strength and intensity, these pictures portray a brand-new kind of hero.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Archive

The exhibition “Heroes” at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents a series of paintings that depict vulnerable, defeated “heroes”, created in 1965-66 by one of the most influential artists of our time, Georg Baselitz. The exhibition presents 60 paintings, drawings, and sketches from the series for the first time. Baselitz’s monumental, frenzied, defiant figures are an energetic statement of the artist’s self-assertion and identity that ran contrary to the prevailing artistic and ideological trends of his time, also are on presentation a selection of paintings from the “Remix” cycle. In 1965, Georg Baselitz saw post-war Germany as a state of multifaceted destruction where ideologies, political systems, and artistic styles were up for discussion. This lack of order was very much in keeping with the artist’s own nature, and he chose to emphasize the equivocal aspects of his time from a skeptical perspective. His “Heroes” in their tattered battle dress possess an accordingly contradictory character, marked by both failure and resignation. The fact that the 27 year old artist decided to take on the subject of “heroes” or “types” was quite provocative, as (male) heroism and its onetime exponents had been called into question by the war and its aftermath. The fragile and paradoxical Heroes find their counterpoint in form, the consistently frontal depiction and central placement of the clearly outlined figure contrast with the wildness of the palette and the vehemence of the pictorial style. Baselitz thus illustrated an unwelcome reality that challenged the story of success of the German Federal Republic’s economic miracle by resorting to figuration, a supposedly obsolete form. Setting aside the positive image associated with the rhetoric of wartime and post-war propaganda, Baselitz’s “Heroes” are the epitome of frailty, insecurity, and inconsistency. These giants in tattered uniforms stand out starkly, wounded and vulnerable, against a rubble-strewn background. Yet the feeling of despair is attenuated by the presence of an object, like an artist’s palette, or the gesture of picking up a small cart, or a shred of countryside as if protecting the seeds of some future crop.   These figures are both tragic failure and a sign of hope: precious ambiguity expressed by a young man born in Germany before the demise of the Nazi regime, who later witnessed the division of his country into two irreconcilable halves and was unable to find a valid model for society in either of them. In addition to showcasing nearly the entire cycle of “Heroes”, the exhibition also presents a selection of drawings and woodcuts on the same theme, as well as the earliest examples of Baselitz’s “Fracture paintings” from 1966 in which the artist experimented with the reorganization of images that preceded the period of upside-down paintings. Establishing an ideal continuity between past and present, the exhibition concludes with a selection of paintings from the “Remix” cycle that Georg Baselitz began to work on in 2005, in these paintings, Baselitz revisited the most provocative aspects of his own history, such as “Die grosse Nacht im Eimer” (1962-63) and “Die grossen Freunde” (1965), and made new versions or interpretations of them with the benefit of hindsight. Enlarged and rapidly painted with swathes of bright, transparent hues and explosive, meandering lines, the “Remix” paintings are radical transubstantiations of their more ponderous predecessors.

Info: Curators: Max Hollein, Eva Mongi-Vollmer and Petra Joos, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Avenida Abandoibarra 2, Bilbao, Duration: 14/7-22/10/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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