11 September – 7 October 2012

In a proclamatory act in 1969, Georg Baselitz turned the motif upside-down (acknowledging debts to Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock), thus "liberating representation from content". He brought about a further reversal: from positive to negative – with unreal colouration drawn from the photographic negative. 

 "The positive evidence in the image contains what it is not. The negative reveals what is reversed by what is visible – as though the greatest resource of art were to combat the visible with what is in itself invisible.  There is no doubt that we are dealing here with Photoshop, but basically there is a lot more to it: our thought-processes – the way a great painter thinks when he is determined to find painting in the place to which it leads him, whether it will or not; as the consequence of a radical optical decision for which it is responsible, whether he wishes it or not." – Eric Darragon

The exhibition, which included 25 works on canvas and a monumental sculpture, is divided into three groups. In one series, Baselitz referred to the well-known painting Bildnis der Eltern II [portrait of my parents] (1924) by Otto Dix (1891-1969), which is now in the collection of the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. Baselitz (who, like Otto Dix, comes from Dresden) has replaced the heads of Dix's parents with those of his own. The emphasis of the composition appears to be on the gnarled hands and the faces of the elderly couple. In a second series, Baselitz portrayed his artistic predecessors, protagonists of Expressionism, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel and Edvard Munch. These portraits are reminiscent of Baselitz's early work at the beginning of the 1960s, when "the painter educes from a head or a portrait its own immanent world" (Eric Darragon). A third group contains works in which Baselitz refers to his own series of Russian Paintings (1998-2001), where he caricatures the social realist works of his youth, paraphrasing them in the style of German Expressionism. In the present sombre colouration, they seem bereft of any feigned positivity or Communist pathos.

Video by Nikolai Saoulski

© Who You Art for Thaddaeus Ropac 2012