Ein Werktätiger

Ein Werktätiger represents a Baselitz's cathartic attempt to reconcile himself with a world in chaos through the act of painting. Brutal, heavy and earthbound, Ein Werktätiger depicts a labourer clutching an axe and presiding over a mound of coiling entrails. The highly textured flesh-coloured painting emphasizes the grisly violence of the scene, personifying man's base closeness to nature. Baselitz's ungainly and disorientated figures wander though the residue of a destroyed Germany and this primordial everyman, caught in the act of butchery, echoes Baselitz's early depiction of archetypal woodsmen and soldiers lost in the wilderness. Associated with the men who returned home from war to find their homes destroyed and their place in society inexorably altered, Baseltiz's often grotesque figures are painted in a deliberately naïve style, their lumpen forms conveying a sense of trauma and displacement.

Inspired by the tormented art of the mentally ill and the emotionally charged figures found in Mannerist painting, Baselitz's imagery confronted the reality of Post-War Germany, yet he was also concerned with the formal properties of painting. By the late sixties he began to destabilise the human form in his painting and in Ein Werktätiger he dissolves the relationship between figure and ground in a confusion of intestines to create an all-over composition that leaves nowhere for the eye to rest. By allowing the labourer to drift to the upper edge of the canvas, his face cropped by the edge of the frame, Baselitz destroys traditional pictorial conventions to instil disharmony to the image and to highlight the essentially abstract nature of painting. The dark and visceral subject matter of Ein Werktätiger expresses the existential crises caused by the after effects of war and Baselitz's search to make sense of human existence and find salvation through art.