ART CITIES:N.York-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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Georg Baselitz presents new paintings in his solo exhibition “Springtime”. In this new series, he has, for the first time, introduced the idea of collage by gluing pairs of nylon stockings onto canvases and painting over and around their diaphanous forms in white, black, or gold. In some paintings, these stocking-figures remain distinct from their backgrounds, while in others, printed impressions replace the hosiery itself, their stretched forms snaking from multihued “skirts” of expressive splatters, like plants from undergrowth. Here, the stockings retain their associations with the human body while also evoking both botanical and abstract forms. There are numerous indicators of stockings’ extensive history in cinema as well as in art, tracing their appearances in such classic films as Francois Truffaut’s La “Peau douce” (1964) and Mike Nichols’s “The Graduate” (1967); or Degas’s images of dancers and Egon Schiele’s confrontational nudes. As a kind of collegial memory, Baselitz has titled several of the paintings in reference to women artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Sarah Lucas, and Kiki Smith. The appearance of the stockings, literally preserved in paintings such as “Start ins Unbekannte” and “Freier Flug” ( both 2020) serves to underscore the fleeting and enduring qualities that coexist there, drawing together an unexpected network of connections among images from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Georg Baselitz has been painting his compositions upside down since 1969. For Baselitz, this novel format was a way of emptying form of its content, navigating between abstraction and figuration, and revolutionising 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 color and material that would come to the fore in his expressionist color 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 his career, as in the «Remix Paintings» he has been creating since 2006 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. He has also introduced a new technique in recent works created using a transfer method, in which the lightness, boldness and vivid coloration is conceived as an homage to Roy Lichtenstein.

Photo: Georg Baselitz, Spaziergang am Meer, 2021 Acrylic, dispersion adhesive, fabric, and nylon stockings on canvas, 118 ⅛ × 157 ½ inches (300 × 400 cm), © Georg Baselitz, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 4/5-1/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-18:00 (Appointments encouraged), https://gagosian.com