Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most celebrated living artists, with a career spanning more than fifty years. Born Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz in Saxony, Germany, he is possibly best known for his paintings of inverted figures, animals, landscapes and still-lives that emerged in 1969. Engaging these classic figurative motifs, Baselitz creates and/or displays work upside down in order to re-focus the viewer on the abstract qualities of his compositions rather than their representational ones. Baselitz has incorporated imagery of forests, trees and rural landscapes in his work since his “Fracture” paintings of the late 1960s. In Winterzeit (2005), one of the recent landscape paintings on view, he revisits this subject in gestural and spontaneous flashes of bright, transparent color that are typical of his more recent work. In three of these paintings, Baselitz also includes in the foreground the inverted bottom half of a figure standing at the entry to a wooded path. Images of legs and feet have been an important presence in Baselitz’s paintings since the 1960s, and can be interpreted as self-portraits or self-reference. Also on view is a group of large-scale, circular portraits of the artist and his wife, Elke. In works like Erst so, Dann so (2002), the figures are not positioned naturalistically in space, but float within a field of color and pattern that is as much foreground as it is background.

 

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Open 3 May - 30 November 2014, on weekends and Wednesdays by appointment.

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For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at + 1 212 256 0057 or info@hallartfoundation.org.

 

The exhibition runs concurrently with Neil Jenney and Olafur Eliasson.