Look, See

January 11th through February 17, 2007
Opening: Thursday, January 11th, 6-8PM

Opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 from 6 pm to 8 pm.

Pictures are omnipresent. They fill our lives as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They can appear anywhere; they make use of every technology and every medium. But pictures not only come upon us everywhere: pictures have effects, they have force, they can heighten their power even to the point of violence-a metaphorical violence, of course. This they achieve in several ways. They can represent violence or endow their aesthetic means with what one might call violent directness. The viewer senses a particular aggression whenever this violence appears mixed with sexuality. And this is precisely what happened in the case of an early picture by Georg Baselitz from 1962, "Der nackte Mann." It was exhibited for the first time in Berlin in 1963, along with "Die große Nacht im Eimer"-and soon the public prosecutor was on the spot, to ban the exhibition and close it down. A scandal!

Over and over throughout his artistic career, Baselitz has shocked the public-in recent years, however, not so much by means of the provocative representation of sexual organs but rather by the great force of the aesthetic strategies he chooses. It would be wrong, however, to emphasize one-sidedly the provocative element of Baselitz's work. Even in the picture of the naked man, there are many other things to observe, for-despite the painting's aggressiveness-despair, fear of the abyss, and an existential solitude or insecurity appear as well in the helpless figure lying in the mud.

(Right: Georg Baselitz, Bussard, 1974, Olie på papir på lærred, h: 200 x w: 162 cm / h: 78.7 x w: 63.8 in)

When Baselitz painted such pictures in the middle of the affluent society of postwar Germany, he saw himself as an outsider, alone in a political reality split between West and East Germany. And precisely this situation that offered no foothold, this feeling of in-betweenness that called into question the self-delusions that sustained East and West Germany, determined his work and fed his creative process again and again with new energy. It was the experience of an existential uncertainty in which the individual, the artist Baselitz, must reinvent himself again and again: this was at the bottom of the work. Therefore Baselitz used only a handful of motifs, which always offered anew the starting point for painterly operations: the tree, the head, the frontal male figure, the eagle, nudes, and so forth. There is much to say about what he does with these motifs, which serve as anchors in the midst of the often turbulent painterly action. Obviously the sheer speed of the painting has a special meaning, as does the materiality of the paint application. There are suggestions of gestures as well, pointing towards the psychic constellation underlying each picture. These elements are combined differently in different periods of Baselitz's work. Take, for instance, a work from the "Heroes" series, painted in 1965-66; before these works, the viewer becomes aware of the materiality of paint, which is brought out in a highly differentiated way. For the surface is not constructed according to a general principle-it is sometimes more and sometimes less impastoed, often tacky and slimy, in many places impulsive. Again and again-in the painting "Ein Roter," for instance, from 1966-anxious contour lines cut through zones of color, creating the effect of a painted jigsaw puzzle. The impression of numbness and helplessness is further reinforced by the way the colored figure appears before the white ground. The "hero"-whose inner life, emotional and agitated, is made vivid as the intense life of the colors-knows no purpose, he sees no outlet for the strength and energy which seem to have been given him.

While Baselitz made manifest in the structure of the works of these years a blockage with regard to the development of a sustainable identity, he began to reorganize the strength of his pictures in the late sixties and particularly in the seventies. It is as though the veil of dream and nightmare fell away from his motifs; now they belong to the real, more or less. The earlier blockages, in motif as well as in execution, disappear and make way for a faster painting process, which the painter's gestures can make freer use of. The act of painting becomes an equivalent for the vital energies Baselitz can make visible. Where do they come from? A curious interlacing of memory and imagination may be observed; an intense friction within the structure of the pictures arises from this combination, for the motifs remain fundamentally static, as is reinforced by their placement in the middle of the picture's surface. While the motifs, therefore, might be called the unconscious of the pictorial structure, or the bridges to a memory to be uncovered, the painterly surface flashes with bolts of color, with sparks and thick masses of pigment. This new stage of Baselitz's painterly operations may be seen in the eagles and nudes of 1976-77. Although these motifs seem to be pulled from reality, Baselitz in fact adapts them from photographs he takes himself. By this means a certain distance from realism is gained, making it possible to create a space for memory. Elke, the artist's wife, appears as a nude, but she stands in the work for a connection to home, origins, inspiration, and so on.

(Left: Georg Baselitz. (German, born 1938). Woodmen. 1967-68. Charcoal and synthetic resin on unprimed canvas, 8' 2" x 6' 6 3/4" (248.7 x 200 cm): 63.8 in)

If, then, the motifs always recur, although the painterly facture of Baselitz's work often changes suddenly, even jerkily, one might compare the overall progress of his artistic investigations to the formation of concentric circles. For this artist, development means not the abandonment of one thing and the invention of something entirely new from one period of work to another, but instead the always renewed interpretation of the underlying constellation of an in-betweenness of past and present.

In the years between 1967 and 1969 this process reached perhaps its most critical point. For the transition from the "Heroes" series, the masterful conclusion of all his early efforts, to the formulation of a new iconography of presentness, of nudes, still lifes, forest scenes, and eagles, which could embody this in-betweenness, proved to be a very risky undertaking. How could the provocative power of the earlier motifs be transformed into a new manner of painting with its resistant and aggressive traits intact? Baselitz searched for others who could guide his new investigation, just as he had earlier discovered for himself the Florentine Mannerists, the artists of the School of Fontainebleau, and outsiders like Antonin Artaud and August Strindberg.

The painter was able to heighten the violence of his images without recourse to nightmares, mutilations, and organ forms by intensifying the materiality of his colors. In doing so, he could go back to his own early reception of Philip Guston and find leads for his own work in that of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Clyfford Still. While the Abstract Expressionists saw their pictorial strategy fulfilled in the suddenness of a painterly eruption, which guaranteed the selfhood of the painter a powerful symbolic presence in the picture as a counterpart, Baselitz avoided this kind of subject-bound expressivity in favor of the restlessness of in-betweenness. With his much discussed "trick" of turning his figures upside down, Baselitz asserted very clearly that his motifs serve as the scaffolding of his paintings and not as their content in the expressionist sense. But the path to the upside-down paintings proved difficult. One can see, in the many steps necessary to come at last to this decision, the pictorial logic behind the upside-down motifs-which were anything but a whim. When Baselitz inverted the motif, the in-betweenness of the painterly handling gained a new freedom. Thus it is only half right when the upside-down motifs are placed in the rich tradition of inverted pictures, such as are required by certain iconographic situations. Examples from the old masters include some motifs in Tintoretto, the crucifixion of St. Peter, and representations of Simon Magus, among many others. With Baselitz, references to such themes are not to be discounted, but ultimately something else plays the essential role-falling down as a symbol for the desire for origins, which nevertheless remain unreachable. The emphasis and retention of the middle of the picture, as the place where the presence of painting and the search for the preconscious meet in the motif, must be seen as central. And it is almost always bodies or metaphors for human bodies, such as trees, that serve as the catalysts for pictorial events.

The paintings of Baselitz resemble an archaeology of the indissoluble connection between the body and emotion, the conscious and the preconscious. This investigation is paired always with the willed finding of the self. When one sees the speed and vehemence on Baselitz's paint application in this light, then an explanation for the violence of the massing of motifs in the eighties may be found here as well. Two essential elements, however, broadened the range of Baselitz's painting after 1980: the varied colors start to glow and the painter as an individual maintains a certain distance from the motif and the picture. The latter observation seems implausible at first, since many personal motifs do appear in the works of the eighties and the personal is even, as in an allegory, transformed into the universal in two large-scale compostions titled "Pastorale." But now Baselitz does not join self-invention as a painter to self-construction as a historical being, as he did in the early sixties, nor does he hint at the rather private realistic motifs of the seventies, but instead he uses his motifs in a manner that might be called allegorical. That is, he joins relics from the past and the present together in compositions, which remain necessarily-as allegories-bulky and unwieldy. The circle of motifs expands, however, in historical dimension, if often into darkened areas-as when the war-scarred Augustus Bridge in Dresden is cited. Other hints show that Baselitz includes the historical as he reflects upon his personal experiences of postwar Germany. Astonishingly, he does this by means of a new style, intensely colored and impastoed, which yields melancholy and painful tones, as in the painting "Motivschimmel-Zerbrochene Brücke." The new definition of memory in Baselitz's work comprises two seemingly incompatible strategies-on the one hand, the motifs are held at a distance, allegorically; on the other, color infuses everything that appears in the picture with almost visionary intensity.

After inventing images of in-betweenness, an unstable state between different times, Baselitz arranged, with great painterly verve, his world of motifs around the unreachable core, a cool crystal which painterly representation can never reach. From time to time in recent years, the artist has spoken of this aim by means of a metaphor; he says he is searching for the "picture behind the picture." Every successful work, in this perspective, is part of a chain of painterly actions that can never arrive at their goal. There can be no now in the painting of Georg Baselitz. -Siegfried Gohr