Neo-expressionist pioneering, baselitz uses a certain rather simple gesture to create visceral compositions with an intense emotional charge.
Continuing to reinterpret previous works of art he gave the figure a central place in painting. Baselitz's interest in portraiture emerges from his fascination with memory as well as his observation that each painting – also un ritratto di another one person - è the self-portrait same artist.
At the Kunstmuseum Basel, he saw Henri Rousseau's Musée Inspires the Poet (Marie Laurencin and Guillaume Apollinaire 1909) and speculated that the couple depicted were Rousseau and his wife – only later discovering that the painting showed the poet Apollinaire and his muse. This realization thus gave rise to a new line of research by Baselitz himself.
Over the past year, the artist has intensified his engagement with images of the past, producing paintings and drawings based on the artists' self-portraits. While working with paint or ink, he seeks out the emotions of each portrait and captures them in his unique style.
In this exhibition, Rousseau reappears, this time alongside Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Otto Dix, Nicole Eisenman, Tracey Emin, Philip Guston, Erich Heckel, Joan Mitchell, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Arnold Schoenberg, Clyfford Still, Andy Warhol and others.
La devotion it is much more than a recognition of the inspirations di baselitz. Each painting flows through a complex lens which is Baselitz's eye. And while the portraits materialize before him, Baselitz transforms them into a physical permanence. He is thus able to unite past, present and future.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with a text by Baselitz and an essay by Morgan Falconer.
Georg baselitz was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Germany, lives and works in Ammersee, Germany; Basel, Switzerland; Imperia, Italy; and Salzburg, Austria. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Center Pompidou, Paris; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Beyeler Foundation, Basel; and Tate, London. Recent institutional exhibitions include Pinturas Recentes, Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2010-11); Baselitz sculpteur, Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris (2011-12); Works from 1968 to 2012, Essl Museum, Vienna (2013); Then, Meanwhile, and Today, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014-15); 56th Venice Biennale (2015); How it started…, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (2015); The Heroes, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2016, visited Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, and Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, until 2017); Preview with Review, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (2017); Baselitz Manner: Nonconformism as a Source of Imagination, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany (2018); Works on paper, Kunstmuseum Basel (2018); and Six Decades, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2018, he traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC).
In May 2019, in conjunction with the Venice Biennale, in a major research curated by Kosme de Barañano, Baselitz's exhibition will open at the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, the first living artist to be hosted in the museum.
Cover image:
Georg Baselitz in his studio, Ammersee, Germany, 2018
Artwork ©Georg Baselitz. Photo: Martin Muller, Berlin
