Georg Baselitz: Ongoing

Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg

INFORMATION

Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg welcomes you to a new installation in the former "sculpture studio" of Georg Baselitz. During his approximately 30-year ownership of Schloss Derneburg, Baselitz transformed a large part of the castle into studio space for painting, sculpture, and printmaking. However, the former castle kitchen of the previous owners - the Münster family - was his primary sculpture studio until the "New Studio" building was completed in 1995. Preparatory wall drawings made by Baselitz while he lived and worked in the castle are preserved and exhibited here alongside documentary photographs taken by the artist's long-time friend and former gallerist, Benjamin Katz. The diamond patterned floor and iron infrastructure which supported the weight of blocks hewn from tree trucks are prominent in Katz's photographs and are still present today.
Photo: Franziska Lenferink

Sculpture is a thing like a miracle. It is built up, decked out, made arbitrarily not as the sign of thoughts but as a thing within the confines of the form. Even if a sculpture is hung from the ceiling, it remains a thing, for even blind people can see it.

It is no corpse, it is not the envelope of something, it is more like a dead machine – one can presume the presence of a spirit in it as a partner for correspondence.

- Georg Baselitz, ‘Skulptur’ / ‘Sculpture’, in Georg Baselitz: Recent Sculpture, Exhibition Catalogue: Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2004.
Baselitz. Preliminary wall drawing for Modell für eine Skulptur, ca. 1989
Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg. Photo: Roman März

Baselitz's sculptural practice began in Derneburg in 1979 with the piece Modell für eine Skulptur (1979-80) - the sole work representing Baselitz in the German Pavilion of the 1980 Venice Biennale. Preliminary sketches for this sculpture are preserved here among others, and show a reclining figure seated on the floor with one arm provocatively extended. The composition resembles African Lobi sculptures from Baselitz's personal collection from which he took inspiration. The artist's sculptural aesthetic is characterized by the rugged tools he employed, including chisels, axes, and chainsaws. Baselitz's practice of purposely maintaining jagged and unrefined edges began with Modell für eine Skulptur , which is composed from roughly hewn blocks of limewood and painted with tempera. Baselitz explained, "In sculpture, using the saw is an aggressive process which is the equivalent of drawing. By working in wood, I want to avoid all manual dexterity, all artistic elegance, everything to do with construction. I don't want to construct anything." [1]
Baselitz in the Atelier. Installation view, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg. Photo: Roman März

Baselitz continued employing linden and ash trees indigenous to Europe for his sculptures, as their wide bases allowed for single block compositions and the species grew prominently around the castle grounds. Linden trees maintain a dexterity ideal for fine sculpture but are also prominent within German folk traditions and culture. In Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther it embodies the epitome of idyll. In the epos Nibelungenlied, its leaves symbolize vulnerability. After bathing in the dragon's blood, Siegfried the dragon slayer is invulnerable except for a spot on his back, which is covered by a linden leaf during the bath and ultimately becomes his nemesis. Between 1997 and 2003 Baselitz took an unprecedented break from sculptural production due to health issues preventing the artist from physical exertions working in wood. When he returned to sculpture in 2003, he began with forms which could be interpreted as self-portraiture, including the medium format Pace Piece (2003) also cut from linden. The sculpture is currently installed in the exhibition Baselitz im Atelier , and resembles the shoes and shorts Baselitz often wore in the studio. The foreshortened leg painted on with oil also resembles Baselitz's mentor, the painter Edward Munch, whose infamous portrait in his studio is abruptly truncated at the artist's knees.
Georg Baselitz. Dunklung Nachtung Amung Ding, 2009. Hall Collection

Thirty years after making Modell für eine Skulptur, Baselitz completed the monumental sculpture, Dunklung Nachtung Amung Ding (2009). The seated figure wears a white cap that resembles Baselitz's studio hat from this period, which the artist first included e.g. in an earlier sculpture titled Meine neue Mütze (2003). Adapted to possibly also resemble a wartime pimpf style with shortened brim, Baselitz then added to the cap the painted inscription ZERO, suggesting both the starting point for inspiration and a reference to Stunde Null (zero-hour, midnight on 8 May 1945). The hulking figure mirrors Rodin's The Thinker (1904) in overall form but not in its precise execution, with splattered and uneven blue paint perhaps interrupting a moment of contemplation it refers to the much older sculptural tradition of the "Pensive Christ" which is still popular in especially Eastern European Folk Art (e.g. in Poland as 'Chrystus Frasobliwy'). The grain of the cedar wood is conspicuous and acts as an additional visual layer, both within the produced rough and jagged edges as well as the inherent cracks within the material.
Georg Baselitz. Dresdner Frauen - Elke, 1989/2023. Hall Collection

Complimenting Dunklung Nachtung Amung Ding, the bronze sculpture Dresdner Frauen - Elke (1989/2023) is presented in Derneburg where Baselitz originally sculpted the Dresdner Frauen series. The exploration of Dresden's post war narrative by the artist, who grew up 60km outside of the city, led to the creation of the wooden sculpture group in 1989. The widespread destruction of the historic city by British and US air raids in February 1945 targeted one of the last intact military bases, an important transportation hub, as well as industrial sites, and resulted in the destruction of the city's center, its iconic buildings, as well as its population. The Dresdner Frauen are Baselitz's homage to the so-called "Trümmerfrauen" (rubble women), who are credited in post war narrative with a significant part in the clearing and reconstruction of destroyed German cities. Like the city's past, which is characterized by violent interventions in the cityscape, Baselitz's portrait named for his wife Elke who was born and raised in Dresden, (yet being a child in the 1940s) is characterized by inverted facial features made with rough markings and demonstrates the raw approach to his sculpture making.
Baselitz. Sing Sang Zero, 2012. Installation view, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg. Photo: Roman März

The angular forms of Baselitz's roughly hewn sculptures translate well when cast, an example of which is installed on castle grounds. Titled Sing Sang Zero (2012), the bronze sculpture in matte black depicts the artist again with studio cap, here linking arms with his wife, Elke. This behavioral form of linked limbs was something that Baselitz recognized as nonexistent within sculptural tradition. The monumental pair share awkward proportions, a widened stance, and horizontal cuts in their limbs and torso that emphasize the physical nature of their making. The work's prominent placement at the museum's entrance honors the couple for whom the castle was home for thirty years.

[1] Georg Baselitz [Exhibition catalogue]. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995: p. 100.
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Installation views: Roman März