GEORG BASELITZ – WIR FAHREN AUS
2016-05-09This exhibition draws together two familiar strands within the artist’s practice: portraiture and the process of ‘remixing’, whereby images are repeated and reinterpreted over time using different techniques and mediums.
For the new, monumental paintings installed across several of the galleries, Baselitz took inspiration from Otto Dix’s candid portrait of his elderly parents sitting side by side on a worn-out sofa (The Artist’s Parents, 1924). In these works, Baselitz revisits an early double-portrait of himself and his wife Elke, from 1975 entitled Bedroom, reinterpreting the image using recent polaroids of himself and Elke nude, sitting in a similar position as Dix’s parents. Painted using a predominantly black and white palette, through portraiture Baselitz explores notions of time passing, physicality and the self, themes powerfully addressed in the earlier, celebrated ‘Avignon’ canvases exhibited at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Continuing to expand his painterly techniques, Baselitz disrupts an easy consumption or reading of his images by using both a characteristic inversion as well as an all-over sprayed ‘haze’, which blurs or diffuses compositional clarity. The paintings take on a spectral, transcendent quality, as if seen through a fog that only gradually lifts as we begin to discern the figures, making reception of them slower, and pushing them towards abstraction.
Opposite – Oh, rosy, oh rosy, 2015
Exhibition runs through till July 3rd, 2016
White Cube
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London
SE1 3TQ
