.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘The hierarchy which has located the sky at the top and the earth at the bottom is, in any case, only a convention. We have got used to it, but we don’t have to believe in it. The only thing that interests me is the question of how I can carry on painting pictures’
- Georg Baselitz
Executed in 1977, Untitled is a large-scale work on paper closely related to Georg Baselitz’s celebrated upside-down portraits of this period. From lyrical streaks and washes of dark paint, a spectral human figure emerges, rendered in the inverted format that characterised the artist’s practice from 1969 onwards. For Baselitz – ‘born into a destroyed order’ at the outbreak of the Second World War – rotating his subjects by 180 degrees was a means of challenging their imposed symbolic value (G. Baselitz, interview with D. Kuspit, ‘Goth to Dance’, in Artforum, Summer 1995, p. 76). Initially harnessing folkloric, Germanic imagery, Baselitz sought to demonstrate that, in the aftermath of global conflict, these symbols had lost their emotive and patriotic power. Once upended, he claimed, their political charge was drained, inviting the viewer to confront the work in purely painterly terms. Throughout the 1970s, the artist began to place his personal life under the same scrutiny, creating inverted portraits of both himself and his wife Elke. Formally, Untitled may be understood in relation to this body of work, which includes paintings such as Fingermalerei – Akt, 1972 (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Fingermalerei – Weiblicher Akt, 1972 (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek) and Fingermalerei – Schwarzer Akt, 1973 (Kunsthalle Kiel). By 1977, Germany’s ‘destroyed order’ had become deeply entwined with the art world. That year, Baselitz and his compatriots famously withdrew their offerings from Documenta VI in protest of A. R. Penck’s replacement by four other ‘official’ East German artists. As the divisions imposed by the Berlin Wall continued to reign, Baselitz – who had moved from East to West Germany in the late 1950s – increasingly defined himself as an outsider. Unlike his contemporaries Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, both of whom responded to American pop culture and its capitalist implications, Baselitz remained attracted to more fluid, expressive painterly idioms. With his lineage in German Expressionist traditions, he was equally inspired by the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Phillip Guston – artists who, like him, had ruptured the traditional relationship between figure and ground. With its visceral human form teetering on the brink of obscurity, the present work bears witness to these dual influences, suspended between the poles of figuration and abstraction.
- Georg Baselitz
Executed in 1977, Untitled is a large-scale work on paper closely related to Georg Baselitz’s celebrated upside-down portraits of this period. From lyrical streaks and washes of dark paint, a spectral human figure emerges, rendered in the inverted format that characterised the artist’s practice from 1969 onwards. For Baselitz – ‘born into a destroyed order’ at the outbreak of the Second World War – rotating his subjects by 180 degrees was a means of challenging their imposed symbolic value (G. Baselitz, interview with D. Kuspit, ‘Goth to Dance’, in Artforum, Summer 1995, p. 76). Initially harnessing folkloric, Germanic imagery, Baselitz sought to demonstrate that, in the aftermath of global conflict, these symbols had lost their emotive and patriotic power. Once upended, he claimed, their political charge was drained, inviting the viewer to confront the work in purely painterly terms. Throughout the 1970s, the artist began to place his personal life under the same scrutiny, creating inverted portraits of both himself and his wife Elke. Formally, Untitled may be understood in relation to this body of work, which includes paintings such as Fingermalerei – Akt, 1972 (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Fingermalerei – Weiblicher Akt, 1972 (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek) and Fingermalerei – Schwarzer Akt, 1973 (Kunsthalle Kiel). By 1977, Germany’s ‘destroyed order’ had become deeply entwined with the art world. That year, Baselitz and his compatriots famously withdrew their offerings from Documenta VI in protest of A. R. Penck’s replacement by four other ‘official’ East German artists. As the divisions imposed by the Berlin Wall continued to reign, Baselitz – who had moved from East to West Germany in the late 1950s – increasingly defined himself as an outsider. Unlike his contemporaries Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, both of whom responded to American pop culture and its capitalist implications, Baselitz remained attracted to more fluid, expressive painterly idioms. With his lineage in German Expressionist traditions, he was equally inspired by the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Phillip Guston – artists who, like him, had ruptured the traditional relationship between figure and ground. With its visceral human form teetering on the brink of obscurity, the present work bears witness to these dual influences, suspended between the poles of figuration and abstraction.