GEORG BASELITZ, 50 YEARS OF PAINTING

The retrospective of Georg Baselitz’s oeuvre follows the exhibitions of works by Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, thus completing the canon of exhibitions featuring three of the most prominent German artists. Around ninety paintings from the beginning of the artist’s career up to now provide extensive insight into his work.

As early as the 1960s, Baselitz formulated a style of painting as well as themes running counter to the prevailing academic art dogma of abstract and nonrepresentational art. His powerful and expressionistic paintings of fallen and wounded heroes ascribe to monumental and heroic figure painting in art history.

These are followed by his fracture paintings, which are then proceeded by his head paintings, in which Baselitz placed the motif on its head in order to remove meaning and sense from the subject. Disassociating the content made it possible for the artist to concentrate on the colors and forms of the subjects without consummating a separation from representational painting.

Over the years, these powerful paintings were followed by a style that became increasingly lighter and which opens out into the loose and open depictions in the remix paintings, in which Baselitz reinterprets important motifs of his artistic development.

The retrospective presents works on loan from prominent private collections and museums as well as the comprehensive body of works by Baselitz in the Frieder Burda Collection.