Works Exhibited
About
This idea of “looking toward the future” is nonsense. I realized that simply going backwards is better. You stand in the rear of the train—looking at the tracks flying back below—or you stand at the stern of a boat and look back—looking back at what’s gone.
—Georg Baselitz
Gagosian is pleased to present Jumping Over My Shadow, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and monumental sculptures by Georg Baselitz.
In 1969, seeking to free painting from the constraint of immediate comparison to reality, Baselitz began inverting his subjects. He painted portraits and landscapes upside-down, creating compositions that appear first as abstractions, but slowly resolve as representational works. More than four decades later, he continues to subvert the painted subject—now seeking atmospheric effects that impart to the viewer the sensation of peering through a vaporous void to discover ambiguous bodies within.
Baselitz’s work confronts the very limits of color, material, and composition. This, combined with his compulsive reference to self, produces an ever-expanding body of work in dialogue with precedents, including his own. Throughout his career, Baselitz has unceasingly revisited particular motifs. This consistent subject matter forms an anchor within a turbulent progression of painterly experimentation. Jumping Over My Shadow presents paintings and drawings that focus on the human body yet make that body difficult to approach or perceive. This set of elusive self-portraits includes several unseen works that Baselitz made after the Avignon paintings, which were featured in the 2015 Biennale di Venezia, a series of eight towering vertical canvases, each containing a single visceral figure.
#JumpingOverMyShadow
Artist
Download
In Conversation
Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi
In conjunction with the exhibition The Painter in His Bed, at Gagosian, New York, Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi discuss the motif of the stag in the artist’s newest paintings.
Georg Baselitz: Archinto
On the occasion of Georg Baselitz: Archinto at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Artcore Films produced a short documentary featuring the artist. In the video, Baselitz details the origins of the project, how he approached the unique space, and his experiments in process and technique.
Baselitz: La rétrospective
Richard Calvocoressi visits Georg Baselitz’s retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and reflects on both the historical specificity and timeless themes of the artist’s sixty-year career.
Georg Baselitz: Pulling Up the Image
In celebration of five recent projects related to Georg Baselitz, Richard Calvocoressi, Max Hollein, and Katy Siegel speak with the artist and look at his prolific career.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2021
The Fall 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Damien Hirst’s Reclining Woman (2011) on its cover.
Georg Baselitz: What if...
Richard Calvocoressi narrates a tour of an exhibition of new paintings by Georg Baselitz in San Francisco, describing the visual effect of these luminous compositions and explaining their relationship to earlier works by the artist.
