Georg Baselitz and Benjamin Katz

Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) is one of the foremost artists in international contemporary art. Opening on 16 April 2010 in the Tennis Palace gallery of the Helsinki Art Museum, the exhibition is the first major presentation of Baselitz's work in Finland and a landmark event of the spring season. Baselitz is known for large, expressive works – and in particular for his perplexing method of painting his subjects upside down.

Since 2005, Baselitz has painted spontaneous, almost watercolour-like reinterpretations of his earlier works. The core of the present exhibition consists of these works from the 2000s, known as Remixes. In addition, the show also includes a selection of paintings from the 1960s and two new sculptures. Baselitz's art has always had a firm link to the traumas of the German psyche, yet it is today also coloured by a new freedom of expression and by humour.

In parallel, the Helsinki Art Museum presents an exhibition of about a hundred photographs of Georg Baselitz taken between 1978 and 2009 by the Cologne-based photographer Benjamin Katz (b. 1939). Katz and Baselitz have known each other for more than 50 years, ever since they were both students in Berlin.

Having worked for a long time as a gallerist and curator, Katz decided in the late 1970s to become a freelance photographer. Since then he has photographed luminaries and events of the European art world, collecting the pictures in an archive that comprises some half a million negatives, over 20,000 of which are of Georg Baselitz. These intimate portraits open up interesting perspectives on the life and art of Georg Baselitz.

Georg Baselitz and Benjamin Katz