ART-PRESENTATION: Georg Baselitz-A Focus On The 80s

Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most celebrated living artists, with a distinguished career spanning over 50 years. 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. In 1963 Baselitz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal and several paintings were confiscated by the East German authorities claiming that they were publicly indecent.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

In 2018, as Georg Baselitz celebrates his 80th birthday. Through paintings, sculptures and works on paper the exhibition “Georg Baselitz: A Focus on the 1980s” traces the artist’s shift towards a more expressionist application of paint and use of color. The exhibition presents seminal works from each of the series Baselitz developed during this decade: “Strandbilder”, “Orangenesser” and “Trinker”. His works on paper included in the exhibition: portrait heads that evoke religious icons, drawings for the “Strandbilder” and untitled figure sketches, represent a parallel strand to his paintings, demonstrating the development of his personal iconography across media. The sculptural works in the exhibition include some of Baselitz’s earliest wood carvings, such as a totemic standing form that prefigures his more recent self-portraits. Baselitz’s method of painting with his fingers in the 1970s encouraged a freer use of color and material that would come to the fore in his expressionist color fields of the 1980s. The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1978; the diptych “Rote Elke-Die Flasche (11 Gruppe)” introduces the dual strands of portraiture and still-life that would occupy Baselitz throughout that decade. His wife Elke has been a recurrent subject since his first painting of her in 1969. In these works, which are not portraits in the traditional sense, Elke’s features and those of Baselitz’s father in “Mein Vater blickt aus dem Fenster” (1981) are schematically represented in expressive orange or pinkish hues, negating the usual function of portraiture as recording a likeness. Baselitz has been painting his compositions upside down since the 1960s, a technique that continues to provoke today as much as when first introduced. For Baselitz, the novel upside-down format was a way to empty form of its content, navigating between the two poles of abstraction and figuration, and revolutionising a medium that was then regarded as irredeemably conventional. His painting “Maria in Knogge-Strandbild 5” (1980) depicts a seated or reclining nude figure as a coarsely-defined silhouette against an ambiguous background of turbulent brushstrokes. The painting is among the significant works in the exhibition relating to Baselitz’s “Strandbilder” (1980-81). The 1980s marked a departure for Baselitz, opening with his selection to represent Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale alongside Anselm Kiefer, which marked the artist’s first foray into sculpture. Roughly hewn using chainsaw, axe and chisel, Baselitz’s sculptures in this exhibition, such as “Ohne Titel” (1983) and “Kopf” (1978/1984) have their origins in folk art and African carvings. Venice was a watershed moment for Baselitz. Following the biennale, Baselitz participated in a series of influential exhibitions across the globe. That same year, a major retrospective of his work was presented at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, later travelling to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Kunsthalle Basel. Two key series from this period, the “Orangenesser” and “Trinker” were featured in Baselitz’s first gallery exhibition in the United States in 1981. In “Orangenesser VI” (1981) and “Orangenesser (VIII)” (1980-81) the intense blue background and shirt create startling contrasts with the complementary orange at the centre of each composition. In “Trinker + Flasche” (1981), the taut equilibrium between yellow-faced figure and the blue hues of the bottle and background achieves a balanced asymmetry. A further significant development in the 1980s was the appearance of religious iconography in Baselitz’s work, evident in paintings like “Die Dornenkrönung” (1983) and “Der Bote” (1984), as well as his “Nachtessen in Dresden” and “Ikone” drawings from the same period. These form part of a sequence of works created between 1983-84 that allude to Biblical narratives, such as the Last Supper and the Passion of Christ.

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, Duration: 3/10-21/11/18, Days & Hours: 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net