Georg Baselitz

If you’re remixing popular music you change the rhythm or the sound. . . . What I do is something entirely different. I have thought for a long time about what to call what I do.

I liked the word ‘remix’ because it comes from youth culture.

What I could never escape was Germany, and being German.
—Georg Baselitz

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Georg Baselitz.

Baselitz’s long and challenging career is marked by intense periods of activity, usually culminating in a heroic masterpiece or group of masterworks, followed by startling renewal and rethinking of his subject. A traditional artisan, he works in equally traditional media—painting, drawing, printmaking, and wood sculpture—often on a monumental scale.

From the outset, Baselitz confronted the visceral realities of history and the human and cultural tragedies of a world in turmoil with a cast of tragic antiheroes, from the grotesque masturbating boy of Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) (1962–63) to the broken soldiers of the Fracture paintings and the inverted figures of the disturbing “upside-down paintings.” In 1980, at the German pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia, he caused a stir with a monumental carved wooden figure that appeared to making a Hitlerian salute. Evidently, what it is to be German and a German artist has been very much on Baselitz’s mind throughout his career—paintings abound with child Hitlers and dismembered woodcutters—although his oeuvre owes as much to a broader range of influences, including art brut, the drawings and writings of Antonin Artaud, sixteenth-century German woodcuts, and African sculptures. With the reunification of Germany in 1990, however, the angst seemingly ebbed from his vision and he produced a series of paintings that he refers to as “sentimental pictures” about his childhood, home, and family in the former East German province of Saxony.