Georg Baselitz In conversation with Peter Elfert
The Lake Ammer has always been a place for artists and writers. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht had cherished the Bavarian lake near the Alps since his childhood, and author Thomas Mann enjoyed the light and landscape here.
In 2006, painter Georg Baselitz was also drawn to this inspiring region, where he built a large studio close to the lakeshore. Today, he works primarily in his studios on Lake Ammer, as well as in others in Salzburg and Imperia, Italy. Throughout all decades of his creative work, he has repeatedly asked himself whether he was the first to work in his particular way. He essentially scrutinised art history, wanting to know whether this new idea of working had already been encountered before. Only when he could definitively answer no did his idea have a chance to be realised. He had no inclination to copy – he wanted to forge his own path. As early as the late 1950s, he learned that he needed to present something new to the viewer. In the mid-1960s, his Heroes series became legendary, and with his upside-down paintings, he established his unmistakable style.
He is time and again asked how tall the ladders are in his studios for his large-scale works. But there are no ladders – Baselitz consistently paints on the floor. Large formats have always played a central role in his work. Just a few weeks ago, he exhibited new large-format pieces at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, all created over the past two years. Now, however, Baselitz is devoting himself to an entirely new field – the staging of a marionette fairy tale. It is perhaps surprising that the artist, known for working predominantly with monumental formats in painting and sculpture, has now found joy in the miniature world of puppet theatre. Working in opera houses however, is nothing new for Baselitz. In 1993, he designed the stage set for the opera in Amsterdam, and in 2018, he created the stage design for Parsifal at the Bavarian State Opera, directed by Pierre Audi. Yet the small stage and working with small-scale, fragile figures is an absolute first for him. What does it mean for a painter and sculptor when he must deconstruct his large-scale figurative thinking? Naturally, Baselitz remains true to his mantra here as well – and surprises once again with something entirely new in the staging. Observing the ingenious Baselitz through the decades of his creative output, and considering the variety of his different paintings and sculptures, it becomes clear that he has remained faithful to one formula since the late 1950s.
