Georg Baselitz, Weg vom Fenster, 1982
I was born amid an order destroyed, in a landscape of ruins, a people in ruins, a society in ruins. And I didn’t want to establish a new order. I had seen more than enough of so-called orders. I had to question everything, I had to become ‘naive’ again, to start over. I have neither the sensitivity nor the education or philosophy of the Italian Mannerists. But I am a mannerist in the sense that I deform things. I am brutal, naive and Gothic.
–Georg Baselitz, interview with D. Kuspit, Artforum
Baselitz – The Retrospective is the first exhaustive exhibition of the German artist in the Centre Pompidou. It brings together his masterpieces of the last six decades in chronological order, revealing his most striking creative periods: from the first paintings and the Pandemonium manifesto in the early 1960s to the Heroes series; from the Fractured compositions and the inverted motifs of 1969, including the successive groups of works for which the artist experimented in masterly fashion with new pictorial techniques featuring varied aesthetics, sustained by references to the history of art and his intimate knowledge of the work of many artists, such as Edvard Munch, Otto Dix and Willem de Kooning, through to the “Russian Paintings” and the self-reflexive creations entitled Remix and Time.
Georg Baselitz, Die große Nacht im Eimer, 1962-1963
Georg Baselitz, Anxiety I (Korzhev), 1999
Georg Baselitz, Männlicher schwarzer Akt, 1977
Georg Baselitz, Die Mädchen von Olmo II (The Girls of Olmo II), 1981
Georg Baselitz, Der Dichter, 1965
Georg Baselitz, Die großen Freunde, 1965
An unclassifiable artist, wavering between figuration, abstraction and a conceptual approach, Georg Baselitz claims to paint images that have not yet existed and to exhume what was rejected in the past: “I was born in the midst of a destroyed order, a landscape in ruins, a people in ruins, a society in ruins. And I didn’t want to introduce a new order. I had seen more than enough of so-called orders. I was forced to call everything into question. I had to be ‘naïve’ all over again, begin again. I have neither the sensitivity nor the education or philosophy of the Italian mannerists. But I am a mannerist in the sense that I deform things. I am brutal, naive and Gothic.”
Georg Baselitz, Fingermalerei – Adler, 1972
Georg Baselitz, G.- Kopf, 1960-1961
Georg Baselitz, Gold drauf und drunter, 2019
Georg Baselitz, Oberon (1. Orthodoxer Salon 64 – E. Neijsvestnij)
Georg Baselitz, Bildneunundzwanzig (Picture-Twenty-Nine), 1994
Georg Baselitz, Ralf III, 1965
Georg Baselitz, Sleeping Car with Iron Bed, 2019
Georg Baselitz, Zero Dom, Installation of a monumental sculpture Parvis de l’Institut du France
Georg Baselitz’s powerful work is inextricably linked to the artist’s imagination and experience, revealing his constantly renewed questions about opportunities to portray his memories, variations on traditional painting techniques and motifs, aesthetic forms established in the course of the history of art, and the formalisms dictated and communicated by the different political and aesthetic regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries, thus illustrating the complexity of being a painter and an artist in post-war Germany.
Baselitz: The Retrospective
October 20, 2021 – March 7, 2022 / Centre Pompidou
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