About
If you’re remixing popular music you change the rhythm or the sound. . . . What I do is something entirely different. I have thought for a long time about what to call what I do.
I liked the word ‘remix’ because it comes from youth culture.
What I could never escape was Germany, and being German.
—Georg Baselitz
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Georg Baselitz.
Baselitz’s long and challenging career is marked by intense periods of activity, usually culminating in a heroic masterpiece or group of masterworks, followed by startling renewal and rethinking of his subject. A traditional artisan, he works in equally traditional media—painting, drawing, printmaking, and wood sculpture—often on a monumental scale.
From the outset, Baselitz confronted the visceral realities of history and the human and cultural tragedies of a world in turmoil with a cast of tragic antiheroes, from the grotesque masturbating boy of Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) (1962–63) to the broken soldiers of the Fracture paintings and the inverted figures of the disturbing “upside-down paintings.” In 1980, at the German pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia, he caused a stir with a monumental carved wooden figure that appeared to making a Hitlerian salute. Evidently, what it is to be German and a German artist has been very much on Baselitz’s mind throughout his career—paintings abound with child Hitlers and dismembered woodcutters—although his oeuvre owes as much to a broader range of influences, including art brut, the drawings and writings of Antonin Artaud, sixteenth-century German woodcuts, and African sculptures. With the reunification of Germany in 1990, however, the angst seemingly ebbed from his vision and he produced a series of paintings that he refers to as “sentimental pictures” about his childhood, home, and family in the former East German province of Saxony.
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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.