Georg Baselitz Erdbeere, 2020
Georg Baselitz has had a profound influence on international art since 1960, and is indisputably one of the most important artists of our time. In the second half of the twentieth century he shaped a new identity for German art by developing an artistic vocabulary which draws on the work of his forebears, whilst remaining unique and wholly individualistic. Since then, Baselitz has constantly renewed his practice through formal developments, drawing upon art history and his own extensive oeuvre, never allowing himself to become restricted by a single, identifiable style.
In Erdbeere (2020), Georg Baselitz returns to a motif that has held a prominent position in his practice for over 50 years: the figure of his wife Elke. The work belongs to a series exhibited at the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova in Venice in 2021, which explored the theme of ice cream (Speiseeis) and in which the works are named after different flavours and rendered in sorbet shades. ‘The white of the ground shines through on the figures like sunlight, and the flavours in the titles – strawberry, lemon, vanilla and blueberry – find a counterpart in the colours,’ writes Philip Rylands in the exhibition catalogue.
The work is an example of the paint transfer technique that is an important recent development in Baselitz’s style. The artist paints the composition onto a piece of unstretched canvas, which is then pressed against a second canvas while wet, giving a mirror-image impression in the final work. Evoking the practice of Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol’s Rorschach paintings and Blotted Line Drawings, the process leaves the paint with a dry, aerated, almost effervescent texture, lending the figure an air of evanescence and movement.
A major exhibition of Georg Baselitz’s recent paintings will be on view at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin from January 2023.
