“Cebe”

Details

Exhibition:

Georg Baselitz, Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich 1995 with colour illus. no pp;

Georg Baselitz + Carl Fredrik Hill, Stockholm, Magasin III, 1995-1996, no page.

Group show, Georg Baselitz, Tony Cragg, Albert Oehlen, Meierbach Galerie, Düsseldorf 2023.

Provenance:

Gallery Michael Werner, Cologne;

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, on the reverse with the label;

Private collection, USA, acquired from the aforementioned.

Description

“I was born into a destroyed order, and I didn’t want to restore order.” Georg Baselitz

– Outstanding, typical pictorial creation of the 1990s with an impasto application of lines and dots that lends the work a high sensual quality

– The composition follows core ideas of his oeuvre with the figure turned upside down and a particularly concise, colour-intensive execution

– Georg Baselitz is one of the greatest and most innovative painters of the late 20th century

With “Cebe” from 1993, Georg Baselitz created a composition that convincingly demonstrates the artist’s experimentation with his upside-down figures. The original power and urgency with which Baselitz works is characteristic of the early 1990s. On a multi-layered red background, the painter scatters countless deep blue impasto lines and dots; in the midst of this thicket, an upside-down figure is recognisable. Everything in this painting seems to vibrate, the blue colour appears raw in its application, almost modelled, whereby the figure approaches abstraction to an unusual degree.

From the very beginning, Georg Baselitz’s painting was figurative and wild – exactly the opposite of abstraction and Art Informel, the predominant pictorial forms of the early 1960s. Baselitz’s painting often had a provocative effect on his contemporaries, the vehemence of his expressive gestures almost destructive. His “Pandemonic Manifesto”, a furious polemic written together with his student and artist friend Eugen Schönbeck, was in clear opposition to the prevailing Art Informel. The two artists declared the ugly, obscene and blasphemous to be the most important themes of a new figurative painting. In a final act in 1969, Baselitz freed the motif from its connotations, creating the first inverted painting with “Wald auf dem Kopf” (“Forest upside down”).