Culture

Baselitz at Pompidou

Paris, Centre Pompidou dedicated a complete exhibition to the German artist Hans-Georg Rem known as George Baselitz (Kamenz, 23/1/1938). Artwoks of the last six decades are on show permit to the visitor a huge retrospective view linked to his expressions.
Baselitz’s major exhibition in France has been curated by Bernard Blistène, former director and Pamela Sticht, curator, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou.
From the first paintings and the Pandemonium manifesto in the early 1960s to the Heroes series, from the Fractured compositions and the inverted motifs of 1969, including the successive groups of works for which the artist experimented in masterly fashion with new pictorial techniques featuring varied aesthetics, sustained by references to the history of art and his intimate knowledge of the work of many artists, such as Edvard Munch, Otto Dix and Willem de Kooning, through to the Russian Paintings and the self-reflexive creations entitled “Remix” and “Time”.
In the exhibition it’s possible to display how since his first works Georg Baselitz has expressed himself through a style characterized by the use of dense, chromatically bright materials and violent gestures. In his art research, with the isolation, fragmentation and the subjects upside down (since 1969) in order to slow down his process of painting as well as the viewer’s comprehension of the motif, Baselitz has overtaken the traditional forms of composition and perspective in large-format works, in which autobiographical memories of places and people, historical memories and references play a primary role cultural.
Taken from a Baselitz’s statement: “An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object”.
The iconic paintings, depicting inverted figures, landscapes, and still lifes, achieve a form of abstraction while maintaining figuration. Since the early Eighties he has also experimented with this materic-gestural approach in the field of engraving and sculpture. employed a wide range of formal and art historical references.

Baselitz—The Retrospective
The Centre Pompidou, Paris
20/10/2021 – 7/3/2022

by Alain Chivilò