Georg Baselitz La boussole indique le nord

22 January—27 May 2023
Paris Pantin

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I am no longer a painter in the old sense; not for a long time. I am rather someone who realises dreams or I present myself as a painter in love with art history. — Georg Baselitz

Watch a video of the artist discussing the exhibition.

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Watch a video of the artist discussing the exhibition.

In celebration of the artist’s 85th birthday, the exhibition brings together five series realised between 2020 and 2021, spanning Tulips with pared-back compositions and contrasting colours, three series of portraits with vivid palettes, and a series of more melancholy portraits on dark backgrounds. 

Baselitz’s recent works are characterised by an unprecedented integration of fabric and by a transfer method that marks a significant recent development in the artist’s technique. The result is a distinctive universe where, both conceptually and materially, the logic of collage coalesces with painting.

Throughout the paintings on view in the exhibition, the artist deploys the monotype printing technique that has become characteristic of...

Throughout the paintings on view in the exhibition, the artist deploys the monotype printing technique that has become characteristic of his practice in recent years. 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.

Is nee muss nee, 2020
Oil on canvas
300 x 250 cm (118.11 x 98.43 in)

Baselitz’s wife Elke has been a constant subject of the artist’s work throughout his career, ever since he first painted...
Baselitz’s wife Elke has been a constant subject of the artist’s work throughout his career, ever since he first painted her in 1969. Showing her from the waist up, her head resting on her hand, the group of new portraits in the exhibition pays homage to Baselitz’s very first depiction of her, which is today part of the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
 
Surnee renee alnee, 2020 
Oil on canvas
300 x 250 cm (118.11 x 98.43 in)

In several of his most recent works, Baselitz calls on touch. [...] As its seams, folds, and contours are visible, the work creates the sensation of a body covered with light drapery both stained and streaked. It would be tempting to trail one’s hand over these veils. — Philippe Dagen, art historian and critic

Baselitz takes his monotype technique a step further in his intensely chromatic portraits with stockings, transferring the figure of Elke...

Baselitz takes his monotype technique a step further in his intensely chromatic portraits with stockings, transferring the figure of Elke onto a piece of fabric which he then affixes to the canvas. Allowing the creases of the fabric to mirror the delicate folds of skin, this unprecedented technique brings to mind the imprint left by Christ’s body on the Shroud of Turin. Impregnated with her form, the printed fabric implies an imagined contact with Elke’s body.

Das ist auch ein Weg, 2021
Oil, dispersion adhesive, fabric and nylon stocking on canvas
300 x 210 cm (118.11 x 82.68 in)
I was thinking of the splinters that occur in cubism. Only, because of the colourfulness and the lightness, they have become quite different things. — Georg Baselitz
The same group of paintings in the exhibition feature a new element in Baselitz’s visual vocabulary: a disjointed pair of...
The same group of paintings in the exhibition feature a new element in Baselitz’s visual vocabulary: a disjointed pair of nylon stockings affixed to the upside-down portrait of Elke, like fragile, disembodied legs. Existing on a different plane to the oil-painted figures, they give the canvases a third dimension, expanding them into the realm of collage to evoke the work of German Dadaist Hannah Höch, who employed cut-out legs to construct mismatched bodies in her pioneering photo collages.
 
Das Gras ist festgetreten, 2021
Oil, dispersion adhesive, fabric and nylon stocking on canvas
300 x 210 cm (118.11 x 82.68 in)
On these darker works, Baselitz transfers the same monotype figure twice in a composition that references Picasso’s L’Aubade. In this...
On these darker works, Baselitz transfers the same monotype figure twice in a composition that references Picasso’s L’Aubade. In this...

On these darker works, Baselitz transfers the same monotype figure twice in a composition that references Picasso’s L’Aubade. In this melancholy 1942 painting, Picasso took a sombre approach to the traditional female nude, which Baselitz alludes to in his own take on the theme. As Philippe Dagen writes, the first impression of the figure depletes the paint for the second impression, so that it is ‘stripped of a part of its substance, the second painting being like the ghost of the first’.

Die Gitarre schweigt, 2021
Oil on canvas
300 x 420 cm (118.11 x 165.35 in)

Pablo Picasso
L'Aubade, 1942

Oil on canvas
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

For Baselitz, painting is not an image and even less an image of an image – but the material manifestation of a presence.

— Philippe Dagen

 

Bursts of working in intense colour are always matched in the artist’s practice by periods in which a more subdued...
Bursts of working in intense colour are always matched in the artist’s practice by periods in which a more subdued...

Bursts of working in intense colour are always matched in the artist’s practice by periods in which a more subdued palette dominates. This monumental self-portrait on an impenetrable background of black brushstrokes bears witness to this duality. The central silhouette is reminiscent of the artist’s celebrated Heroes series from the 1960s. The multiple stockings, in turn, recall the feet and legs that have been a recurring theme since the artist’s very early works.

Young man stockings, 2021
Oil, dispersion adhesive and nylon stockings on canvas 
480 x 300 cm (188.98 x 118.11 in)

B.j.M.C. - Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1965
Oil on canvas
162 x 130 cm (63.78 x 51.18 in)
 
A group of paintings on a powder-blue ground evokes the blue backgrounds of German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder’s...
A group of paintings on a powder-blue ground evokes the blue backgrounds of German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder’s...

A group of paintings on a powder-blue ground evokes the blue backgrounds of German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portraits, as well as the cyan environments characteristic of Pablo Picasso’s Surrealist nudes from the 1920s and 30s, demonstrating Baselitz’s constant engagement with the history of painting.

Dinardblau, 2020
Oil on canvas
250 x 300 cm (98.43 x 118.11 in)

Pablo Picasso
Ballplayer on the Beach, 1928
Musée Picasso, Paris, France

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Bildnis Martin Luthers1532
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Germany

The nude body, whether it be male or female, has been omnipresent in Baselitz’s work since the beginning. More surprising are the bouquets of red tulips in a red vase. [...] Baselitz painting flowers: this is indeed unexpected, though the motif itself has been present in the works of some of the most recognized painters of the 20th century. Henri Matisse, Max Beckmann, Eugène Leroy, and David Hockney all painted bouquets. Why would Baselitz not permit himself to do so? — Philippe Dagen
Since the early 2000s, Baselitz has been returning to the key phases and motifs of his own past oeuvre in...

Since the early 2000s, Baselitz has been returning to the key phases and motifs of his own past oeuvre in a series of paintings known as Remix. The Tulips on view in the exhibition are a remix of the flowers he painted at the very beginning of the 1980s. In this group of works, the subject leans in from the left of the canvas to interact with the emptier right side to create a taut relationship between subject and background and a compositional equilibrium reminiscent of the balanced asymmetry of Piet Mondrian.

Gruß aus Holland, 2020
Oil on canvas
300 x 230 cm (118.11 x 90.55 in)
Baselitz titles these paintings, whose floral subjects are themselves inextricably linked with the Dutch Old Master tradition, ‘Greetings from Holland’,...
Baselitz titles these paintings, whose floral subjects are themselves inextricably linked with the Dutch Old Master tradition, ‘Greetings from Holland’, ‘If Piet had stayed in the country’ or ‘Piet is gone, to NY’. In doing so, he evokes Mondrian’s journey from the Netherlands to the USA, and corresponding transition from figuration to abstraction. It is this space between the two traditional poles of painting that Baselitz has navigated throughout his career, confronting them at times, at others circumventing them to forge his own singular path.
 
Wenn Piet im Lande geblieben wär, 2020
Oil on canvas
300 x 230 cm (118.11 x 90.55 in)
According to museum curator Bernard Blistène, Baselitz ‘works from the very conventions of painting, and yet [is] perhaps the painter who has most destroyed these conventions.’ This has been the case since he first inverted a canvas, a compositional play he has now been employing for more than 50 years. In the new works, through previously untried experiments with collage and novel mark-making techniques, it is the conventions of painting’s materiality that Baselitz tests, bringing his innovation up to the threshold of his 85th birthday.
La boussole indique le nord is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with a text by art critic Philippe Dagen. Catalogue
La boussole indique le nord is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with a text by art critic Philippe Dagen.
 
Learn more about the artist On the occasion of Georg Baselitz's 85th birthday, museums and institutions around the world are...
 
On the occasion of Georg Baselitz's 85th birthday, museums and institutions around the world are dedicating exhibitions to various facets of the artist's wide-ranging oeuvre, visit our dedicated page. 
 
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