Georg Baselitz - Time

Georg Baselitz comments on his new series of large-scale paintings and drawings presented in the exhibition 'Time' at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin (15 September 2019 - 25 January 2020)
The thirty paintings and twenty drawings in the exhibition mark a new step in his artistic meditation on the passage of time, first addressed by the artist in 2015 with his series of Avignon self-portraits presented at the Venice Biennale. The combination of grace and severity in the new paintings dedicated to his wife Elke represent a renewed declaration of love, as well as an intimate reflection on the inevitability of ageing and the function of portraiture. By taking his beloved as his subject matter in a series of portraits where the beautiful and the grotesque are intricately modulated, the works are reminiscent of those by Otto Dix, Lucas Cranach and Willem de Kooning.
Georg Baselitz has refined his painterly vocabulary through his focus on the fundamentals of the body form, and these figures seem to float in an undetermined space when seen from a distance. At times they appear iridescent, or almost indistinguishable from the background, as if dissolving into their surroundings. Conversely, when viewed closely, the canvases reveal an unprecedented variety of surface treatments and details. The use of gold mixed with paint gives a number of the works a cosmic dimension never before seen in Georg Baselitz’s work, bathing the figures in a soft light that seems to radiate from within.
In the Pantin exhibition, the figure of Elke is modulated in various ways. Several canvases incorporate abstract geometric areas that evoke the shape of a grand piano, recalling the classic typology of the portrait of a woman sitting at the piano. A series of double portraits on a pink background show sculptural figures in contorted poses that evoke the artist's interest in 16th century Florentine mannerism, a trait that was already found in the deformation and elongation of the members of his 'Heroes' in the 1960s. An other series of double portraits recall the composition of Otto Dix's 'Portrait of Parents' (1924), a painting which, in its crude vision of reality, influenced Baselitz’s perception and representation of the body. A set of paintings with even more indefinite outlines has been created by imprinting one canvas on another, as if the image were already ready to be erased.
Video by Nikolai Saoulski

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I love Georg Baselitz! Great Great painter and always something interesting to say

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