Baselitz - Painter

The exhibition Baselitz – Painter is a major retrospective exhibition of the work of the German artist Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), from his earliest paintings in 1960 up to 2006. The exhibition has been created in close collaboration with Georg Baselitz himself and will show about 70 paintings and 50 drawings. Louisiana was the first museum in Denmark to present works by Georg Baselitz. That was in 1983. Ten years later the museum arranged a studio exhibition showing where the artist was in his oeuvre in the years 1990-93.

Now the time has come for a retrospective exhibition. Throughout all these years Louisiana has followed Baselitz’s work, as reflected by the museum’s collection of some 20 works ranging over painting, sculpture, drawings and graphic art. The exhibition is the third in the series of major retrospective presentations of German artists: Sigmar Polke in 2001, Gerhard Richter in 2005, and now Baselitz – together forming a picture of the direction in which the German avant-garde of the 1970s took art.

Georg Baselitz belongs to the small group of artists who worked their way towards a new German style of painting in the sixties and seventies. They were on the front line of the debate on the relations among art, society and history; they developed a new figurative art, at the same time confronting the difficult question of what it means to be a German artist in the wake of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

The historical awareness is reflected in a. o. Baselitz whose works include representations of biographical elements since the beginning of his career. However, it was not until 1996, with the series of “family pictures”, that this became a dominant theme with direct references to the family album: “The characteristic feature of my pictures has always had something to do with my biography – people, landscapes, experiences” (Baselitz).

The exhibition brings the viewer very close to the artist – close to the purely painterly challenges that he takes up and to his world of motifs, for which he has drawn on new sources over the past ten years, with inspiration from his childhood, his close family and his in-depth knowledge of Nordic and European art and literature. The exhibition is a cornucopia of painting on painting’s own terms, but it also gives us a nuanced picture of the artist, who has been “turning his subjects upside down” since 1969 and thus eliding the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract.

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Baselitz - Painter
Retrospektive
Georg Baselitz