MAJOR SUBJECTS

Helden
The Helden (Heroes) of 1965-1966, figures and anti-figures of the period all at the same time: young anti-heroes with long hair and a vacant stare wearing worn-out clothes, their fly open ostentating their phallus. They are, however, also figures of literary origin reflecting the post-revolutionary situation in Russia. These monumental effigies set in the middle of the canvas benefit from very direct painting of a powerfully expressive nature that combines surface and contour, contrasts bright colour with black and alternates positive and negative. It is the authority of the very deft line ensuring the cohesion and living innervation of the chromatic marking that strikes the most. One is almost tempted to describe it as painted drawing. Standing still, sitting or walking, these revolutionaries, eccentrics or pioneers look more like country folk when they are not placed among ruins. Variously dubbed friend, shepherd, hero, new type, partisan, painter, exotic character, rebel, Red, Red-Green and Green, they dwell between yesterday and tomorrow in what is at the very least a fragmentary world.

Frakturbilder
Born by scissiparity out of the Helden of 1966, in an apparently shattered universe, the Frakturbilder (Fractured Paintings) belong to the period in which Baselitz, before overturning the image, explores the potential of dissociation, displacement and duplication of the pictorial elements. Even though its legibility is disrupted by the fractures, the image resists. These paintings feature broad brushstrokes in often thick and glowing colours with a predominance of brown, green and blue. With their pastoral or woodland subjects, workers, dogs and/or cattle, handled in additional registers like discontinuous pieces of "patchwork", the Frakturbilder are, of course, connected with the legacy of Cubism and its facets as well as the technique of collage. If, in philosophical terms, the fracture paintings put time to the test with interruptions in the figurative field comparable to the distortions known in the phenomenon of refraction, they respond first and foremost to the need to detach the image, perhaps violently, from any easy association with careful and plausible representation by directing it toward its fundamental modern question, namely the organization and division of the surface. The image does not imitate, the image is.

The overturn
After spending about three years on oil paintings intended to de-structure the organicity of the figure and shatter its integrity, in 1969 Georg Baselitz decides to turn the painted subject upside-down once and for all thus emancipating the representation from its content. Baselitz does not overturn the canvas once he has painted it, he places it on the floor and elaborates his subject directly upside-down. With this gesture of unquestionable subversive impact, Baselitz not only enters another expressive dimension but also leaves an indelible mark on the history of art of the last four decades. This gesture is one of those that have an indelible impact not only on the life of the painter but also on the history of art. The first inverted paintings were family portraits and wooded landscapes followed by birds taken from illustrations in works on regional ornithology. The initial effect is a recrudescence of realism with harder expressive impact maybe due to the artist's use of photographs. Softer and more complex results, also in terms of pigmented substance and modelling, were later obtained in the finger painting series.


Das Motiv
"The motives I use - the hand, the house, the chair - are actually all objects from the intimate sphere". In the paintings realized between 1987 and 1989 these familiar tools will gain autonomy and undergo transformation and diversification, as in 1988. They became motifs, i.e. objects suitable for an authentic activation of the surface of the painting, capable to start the battle of painting or pastel drawing. As Baselitz pointed out in Das Rüstzeug der Maler (1985): "No painter starts off looking for motifs. That would be a paradox because the motif is in the painter's head, a thinking mechanism". The motif is thus crucial for the pictorial plane and only very incidentally so for its meaning. When Baselitz encloses his motif in a grid or rests it upon a lattice, when he leans it against a tree, it is in order to connect the figure to the background with the same awareness as Cézanne, who held fast to his motif ("je tiens mon motif"), knowing full well that without the thread of a construction leading it back to him, everything would fall apart.

Sculpture
"Sculpting is a very hostile and aggressive act" Baselitz once said. Given the physical effort involved in the production of a sculpture, since 1979 he engages only every so often in this not very speculative art, which engages without detours into reality, giving voice to a kind of primitive energy detached from all canons. His figures alternately suggest a totem of the primitive arts, a Germanic idol exhumed from a peat bog, and possibly a deeply bewildered being of the type to be found in Munch. By virtue of the sharp tools and blunt instruments he uses, he generates a rustic script made up of splinters, skids and stiffness, leaving a "skin" of rough, gnarled, light-catching physicality upon which the applied colour marks out shading, contrast and pointed insistences, areas to be cleared or sketched underlining.

The painting of the nineties
After 1995 Baselitz's painting underwent an invasion of both pictorial modes and iconographic programmes generated by memories of his personal history as well as his family circle and friends. The imagination of the artist explodes on the canvases in an unstoppable flood with a speed of execution enhanced by the use of highly diluted paint and a treatment of the composition that has more to do with drawing rather than painting. Together with the barely sketched figures, against backgrounds summarily defined by broad expanses of colour, the canvases display rings left by cans of paint, splashes, drippings and footprints indicative of the fact that the artist works on his paintings spread out on the floor of the studio. Baselitz pins down, annotates and photographs the images that flow to his mind with the extraordinary freedom of an artist, now fully aware of his expressive means and hence even more uninhibited in the adoption of morphologies or associations between forms of representation that would be unthinkable for other painters. He also realizes caustic and disillusioned historical paintings, where he explores formal inventions that do not disdain the grotesque and the parody as in Anxiety I (Korzev) or in the pseudo-pointillist digression of Lenin beim Telegraphen (Grabar) and Lovers (Korzev) - postpop.

Cowboys
Between 2002 and 2003 Baselitz re-elaborates the original iconography of the Cowboys starting from the work of the Danish-American Olaf Wieghorst, the artist of the Far West par excellence. The motif of the cowboy riding his nag is more or less faithfully preserved, almost too strongly present and yet extremely banal. The insistence on the simple drawing, suggesting a certain stiffness of the pen, poorly or brusquely coloured, and subjected to summary pictorial treatment, most often in a "slightly melancholic" snowy setting, results in a reversal of the actually mimetic reality. These images of such a determined - if not over-determined - character can be seen on closer examination as their transparent, disembodied shadows, as a mirage. Stiffened bodies in a world that is almost in a state of suspense where painting exploits resemblance so as to surpass it all the better, as can be guessed in Wagner malt einen Reiter im Schnee, one of the major works in the series of horses and riders.


Remix
The artistic output of Georg Baselitz has always been permeated by a constant need to rework its subjects which, from 2005, gives life to a systematic re-elaboration of the works he produced as a teenager and during the 60's such as Die Hand or Lockiger. These works are updated, rethought and presented again in monumental paintings and watercoloured drawings. Through this revision of his major success Baselitz becomes, in some way, the organizer of his own retrospective: "The idea of the Remix series came from constant involvement with my things, with the paintings and drawings I have produced, a sort of exhibition of accomplished work that I organise myself, and also from admiration for things that I once made and am perhaps no longer capable of making […]. There is a comparison with the old painting, most definitely, but the new one is, at the very least, better adapted to the period because it has been made properly, and quickly, with greater detachment than before. You do your best all the same to shake the model a little, walking around it and injecting new elements."

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