ART-PRESENTATION: Georg Baselitz-Years later
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: Gagosian Gallery Archive
An early pioneer of the Neo-Expressionist movement that had its origins in postwar Germany, Baselitz combines a vigorous and direct approach to art making with a sensitivity to art historical lineages. He counts Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston among his key influences, and is known for his uncompromising approach and critical stance. In 1969, he began to compose his images upside down to slow the processes of making, looking, and comprehending. Over the past fifty years, often referring to and reinterpreting his own body of work, he has further augmented his visual language with a range of formal and historical allusions yet has consistently returned to the human figure as his central motif. This exhibition “Years later” is focused on a set of thirteen large oil paintings that Baselitz made using a “contact-printing” technique related to the one applied in his series “What if…” (2019), which was exhibited at Gagosian San Francisco earlier this year. To create each new black-and-gold painting he uses a stencil to render inverted figures on blank canvas, painting just the panel’s background to generate bold negative silhouettes. Against this ground he presses a black canvas, lifting this second support to produce an image distinguished by a slightly softer look than those made more directly. The hybrid result not only stresses medium over image, but is also distinguished by an element of unpredictability that bespeaks freedom and vitality. In a single painting in pink, the figures are rendered without a stencil as positive images. With part of their material substance surrendered to the transfer technique, the works in Years later incorporate a palpable sense of organic change and variation; they juxtapose traces of Baselitz’s haptic intervention with marks derived specifically from the contact-printing process. This lends their surfaces a specific tension, while the play of subtle similarities and differences from one panel to the next adds a dynamic rhythm to the series as a whole—a nod to the idea of the human frame in motion. As one image begets another, the figures become less and less distinct and gradually merge with their backgrounds, dissolving subject into context, humanity into reality at large. In these paintings, the dark, chaotic nature of this reality finds its full expression.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 21/5-8/8/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com
