Georg Baselitz

Gagosian is pleased to present Springtime, an exhibition of new paintings by Georg Baselitz.

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Baselitz has combined a direct and provocative approach to making art with an openness to art historical lineages, counting among others Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston as his key influences. In 1969, he began composing the inverted images for which he has become best known to slow the processes of making, looking, and apprehending. During the past fifty years, he has augmented his visual language with a range of formal and historical allusions while consistently returning to the human figure. Often he reinterprets—cannibalizes—his own work.

Just as the exuberant provocations of Dada—as seen in the work of Hannah Höch, George Grosz, and others—emerged out of the catastrophes of the First World War, so does Baselitz’s title herald a spirited reawakening from the ravages and restrictions of the current pandemic. In this new series, he has, for the first time, introduced the idea of collage by gluing pairs of nylon stockings onto canvases and painting over and around their diaphanous forms in white, black, or gold. In some paintings, these stocking-figures remain distinct from their backgrounds, while in others, printed impressions replace the hosiery itself, their stretched forms snaking from multihued “skirts” of expressive splatters, like plants from undergrowth. Here, the stockings retain their associations with the human body while also evoking both botanical and abstract forms.