In response to the XNUMXth birthday of Georg baselitz, Museum interlinden felt it was fitting to pay emphatic homage to one of the greatest exponents of German art, an artist who preserves the legacy of Grünewald, the leading figure in Germanic painting whose masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece, is kept from the museum.
Corpus baselitz is the first exhibition in a French museum of a new body of 70 works (paintings, drawings and sculptures) produced between 2014 and 2018, in which the artist examines his own body and, through it, his place in history of art.
In the winter of 2014-2015, Baselitz embarked on a dark and introspective series of nude self-portraits, in which he faces the reality of his age, summoning his past works and his masters (Duchamp, Dubuffet, Dix, Picasso…) in an apparent plunge into the abyss.
The worn out, mutilated, helpless body is displayed, uncompromisingly and without pathos, in abstract spaces: the violence of his treatment of the subject against the background of darkness and oblivion is counterbalanced by the movement and repetition of the motif, by the generosity of the medium , the vigor of the artist's gesture and a new pictorial technique that transfigures the bodies, leaving them luminescent and vibrant.
An existential reflection in which the artist bares himself, his recent work is simultaneously a new beginning, a rebirth and a return to his origins.
Exhibition curator:
Frédérique Goerig-Hergott, senior curator, Musée Unterlinden
