Georg Baselitz Traumflug sex, 2025

The present work is a semi-abstract double-portrait of Georg Baselitz’s wife, Elke, who has been a constant presence in the artist’s imagery since the first upside-down portrait he painted of her in 1969. Paintings of Elke constitute the largest single group of Baselitz’s portraits, in which the artist engages with the complexities of representation and the inescapability of subjectivity. In Traumflug sex (2025) he depicts the figures floating amid the picture plane, one of them horizontal, the other vertical, in a composition that references Picasso’s L’Aubade (1942). Each figure is rendered in an array of muted pastel tones that lend them a certain iridescence as they emerge, apparition-like, against a monochromatic backdrop in deep grey hues. Expressive, textured striations run over the painting’s surface. Ever the innovator, Baselitz uses his walking frame as a tool for mark-making: an embodied, physical approach that recalls the all-over canvases of Abstract Expressionism, as well as the techniques of Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Beuys.