Georg Baselitz Gruß aus Holland, 2020

Since the early 2000s, Georg Baselitz has been returning to the key phases and motifs of his own past oeuvre in order to re-examine them. Gruß aus Holland (Greetings from Holland, 2020) was painted using a monotype printing technique that the artist developed in recent years whereby he paints the composition onto a piece of unstretched canvas before pressing a second canvas against it while wet to create a mirror-image impression. For this work, Baselitz revisits the tulips he painted at the very beginning of the 1980s. The taut relationship between subject and background forms a compositional equilibrium that, in the words of Diane Waldman, curator of Baselitz’s 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, ‘recalls the balanced asymmetry that Piet Mondrian achieved in his Compositions of the 1920s and 1930s.’ By depicting the tulips, a subject that is inextricably linked with the tradition of the Dutch Old Masters, in a pared-back composition of blocks of contrasting colours, and with the expressive, aerated texture of paint provided by the monotype printing method, Baselitz navigates between figuration to abstraction to forge his own singular path between the two traditional poles of painting.