Georg Baselitz : Darkness Goldness

4 Sep-14 Nov 2020

Overview

Since the beginning of his career, Georg Baselitz has painted ‘monstrous’ hands and feet. His famous ‘Heroes’ series of the mid-1960s, for example, show battered figures with over- or undersize extremities standing in blasted landscapes. Their hands bear stigmata or hold tiny burning buildings or farm implements – symbols, perhaps, of the cycles of destruction and regeneration in 20th-century Germany. In his new paintings, Baselitz creates striking images of hands that emerge out of dark backgrounds and hang open and limp. In them, as in all his paintings, Baselitz is uninterested in conventional representation. His skillful draftsmanship is evident in related ink-on-paper drawings, which are more traditionally realistic, tracing intricate folds of skin and expressive configurations of the fingers. By contrast, in the paintings Baselitz works against his own dextrousness to produce something that exists in a realm between abstraction and figuration.