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Lot Essay
Standing almost ten feet tall, Georg Baselitz’s Orangenesser I (Remix) is a painting of great physical presence and visual impact, as its bold and sweeping brushstrokes, set down rapidly and intuitively, define the painting’s energetic surface. The palette is made up of dramatically shifting light and dark tonal contrasts; swaths of black pigment, with areas of open space between them, establish a frame around the figure, which—in turn— exists against a background of blended white, pink and blue brushstrokes. The animated brushwork and rapidly executed figure suggests a work created with swiftness and passion, with emotion taking precedence over everything else.
The present work is an outstanding example from Baselitz’s late career Remix series. With works such as this, the artist returned to explore and excavate significant phases of his early-career work of the 1960s, mining past ideas and methods, pushing his painterly vocabulary to create works of a renewed vitality and freshness, and casting a sometimes-ironic view on motifs previously investigated. The evocative human form at the center of the present work is made up of impulsively drawn pale blue, pink, and violet shadings, pink flesh, and a bright red mouth. As with the entire canvas, the paint establishing the figure is vigorous, with cutting and sweeping strokes and gestures.
By making the extraordinary and provocative choice to invert the human figure, Baselitz achieves both an abstract and a figurative effect at the same time. He began painting inverted figures in 1969, and these ‘upside down’ paintings became a strategy for Baselitz to explore questions of existence and external reality, and to create a style of painting that would be fundamentally self-referential, bringing the viewers attention to focus on the painterly surface itself, not the illusion of reality. In addition, the unusual choice becomes a way for the artist to approach his expressionist themes with his trademark sardonic sense of humor.
The Remix series also suggest the obsessive and the transitory, expressing the older artist’s reflections on time, loss, risk and possibilities. These paintings show flashback traces of earlier paintings’ subjects, but often with new, more transparent colors and a freer, more spontaneous use of paint. These late-career paintings demonstrate his tireless desire to continue to develop and experiment as an artist. He has said, “for the first time, almost at the end of my career, I have found a method in which I very slowly disappear from the process. I pull back, so to speak, so that I can float a little higher. …What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms” (G. Baselitz, quoted by P. Kort, “Georg Baselitz Talks to Pamela Kort,” Artforum, April 2003).
Born in 1938, Baselitz was a founding member of the German Nueue Wilden movement that revitalized expressive painting and figuration in the late 20th century and beyond. His work expresses what might be called a romantic quest, his figures struggling against aspects of Modernity that are hostile to the human individual, although his subjects are often uneasy and anything but heroic. His technique is characterized by an intentionally highly active surface, while his subject matter draws on themes that explore trauma pain, and raw emotion, wrenchingly expressed through his charged handling of paint on canvas.
His work has represented a powerful and influential alternative vision to the style of gestural abstraction that was ascendant when he was first starting out as a young art student in Berlin in the early 1960s, and has served as as a vital counterpoint to Minimalism and Conceptual Art, establishing a dialogue with these vary different varieties of postwar and contemporary art.
In addition, Baselitz’s art reflects a grasp of an astonishing array of artistic and philosophical currents of the 20th century, particularly those exploring the status of the outsider, abjection, and spiritual hunger. These sources of inspiration have been wide-ranging and have included the paintings of Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, the writings and drawings of Antonin Artaud, and philosophers and writers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, and Charles Baudelaire.
Throughout Baselitz’s career, he has focused on producing a highly charged and intense style of figurative work, as exemplified by the present painting, merging the personal with the political as he experienced it coming of age in mid-20th century postwar Germany. As Diane Waldman has surmised, “Baselitz has emerged over the past several decades as one of the most compelling artists to revitalize painting and powerfully reinvest realist idioms with a new sense of purpose” (D. Waldman, Georg Baselitz: Art on the Edge, New York, 1995, p. xii).
The present work is an outstanding example from Baselitz’s late career Remix series. With works such as this, the artist returned to explore and excavate significant phases of his early-career work of the 1960s, mining past ideas and methods, pushing his painterly vocabulary to create works of a renewed vitality and freshness, and casting a sometimes-ironic view on motifs previously investigated. The evocative human form at the center of the present work is made up of impulsively drawn pale blue, pink, and violet shadings, pink flesh, and a bright red mouth. As with the entire canvas, the paint establishing the figure is vigorous, with cutting and sweeping strokes and gestures.
By making the extraordinary and provocative choice to invert the human figure, Baselitz achieves both an abstract and a figurative effect at the same time. He began painting inverted figures in 1969, and these ‘upside down’ paintings became a strategy for Baselitz to explore questions of existence and external reality, and to create a style of painting that would be fundamentally self-referential, bringing the viewers attention to focus on the painterly surface itself, not the illusion of reality. In addition, the unusual choice becomes a way for the artist to approach his expressionist themes with his trademark sardonic sense of humor.
The Remix series also suggest the obsessive and the transitory, expressing the older artist’s reflections on time, loss, risk and possibilities. These paintings show flashback traces of earlier paintings’ subjects, but often with new, more transparent colors and a freer, more spontaneous use of paint. These late-career paintings demonstrate his tireless desire to continue to develop and experiment as an artist. He has said, “for the first time, almost at the end of my career, I have found a method in which I very slowly disappear from the process. I pull back, so to speak, so that I can float a little higher. …What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms” (G. Baselitz, quoted by P. Kort, “Georg Baselitz Talks to Pamela Kort,” Artforum, April 2003).
Born in 1938, Baselitz was a founding member of the German Nueue Wilden movement that revitalized expressive painting and figuration in the late 20th century and beyond. His work expresses what might be called a romantic quest, his figures struggling against aspects of Modernity that are hostile to the human individual, although his subjects are often uneasy and anything but heroic. His technique is characterized by an intentionally highly active surface, while his subject matter draws on themes that explore trauma pain, and raw emotion, wrenchingly expressed through his charged handling of paint on canvas.
His work has represented a powerful and influential alternative vision to the style of gestural abstraction that was ascendant when he was first starting out as a young art student in Berlin in the early 1960s, and has served as as a vital counterpoint to Minimalism and Conceptual Art, establishing a dialogue with these vary different varieties of postwar and contemporary art.
In addition, Baselitz’s art reflects a grasp of an astonishing array of artistic and philosophical currents of the 20th century, particularly those exploring the status of the outsider, abjection, and spiritual hunger. These sources of inspiration have been wide-ranging and have included the paintings of Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, the writings and drawings of Antonin Artaud, and philosophers and writers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, and Charles Baudelaire.
Throughout Baselitz’s career, he has focused on producing a highly charged and intense style of figurative work, as exemplified by the present painting, merging the personal with the political as he experienced it coming of age in mid-20th century postwar Germany. As Diane Waldman has surmised, “Baselitz has emerged over the past several decades as one of the most compelling artists to revitalize painting and powerfully reinvest realist idioms with a new sense of purpose” (D. Waldman, Georg Baselitz: Art on the Edge, New York, 1995, p. xii).