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Lot Essay
Ciao America II is the second painting from the series entitled Ciao America that Baselitz made in 1988. The ambiguous title that Baselitz gave to these works was deliberate. The word 'ciao', used as both a greeting and a farewell reflects one of the central themes of the series which is a similar sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. Writing about the series of 40 woodcuts also entitled Ciao America II that Baselitz also made in 1988 for the fortieth anniversary of the Galerie Springer - one print representing each year - Baselitz pointed out that the birds that appear in these works grew so numerous that they came to convey what he considered to be an appropriate sense of disorientation. 'There are forty or more birds,' Baselitz wrote, 'but since they are upside-down and consist only of lines, patches and splinters of bright colour which glimmer through the black surface, it is difficult to tell if they are in fact birds and if so, how many of them there are. 'The result' of the works, he points out, 'is somewhat like a sea-shanty sung by a drunkard. This explains the title. When you are being tossed about in a boat, it is difficult to avoid repeating yourself, to avoid monotony' (cited in: Georg Baselitz, F. Dahlem, Cologne 1990).
In Ciao America II numerous birds are also present, seemingly emerging from and merging into a grid-like blue background. Painted throughout in broad clumsy strokes of kindergarten colour, the painting is a tightly controlled mess of form. The visual procession of all these dumb-looking upside-down birds becomes an absurd parade that seems to throw the same strange and perhaps unanswerable questions at the viewer as Baselitz himself posed in the text he wrote to accompany the paintings when they were exhibited at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in April 1990. 'How good, really, is one's adhesion to the ground?' Baselitz asked, 'To stand, to fall, to fly. What comes hard, (is) to get behind the mystery of pictures, whether by sympathy, by reflection, or by analysis ... Ciao is one formula...you say it when you come, you say it when you go. There's something coming from America. What?... Beyond the hundredth meridian it disperses; on this side it rises up as smoke, dancing smoke. The smoke forms into pictures above the roof. I thought to myself, here as there, someone is sitting in a room and doing it, tapping the key, transmitting: yellow, red, red, blue, black, dash, dot, dash' (Georg Baselitz in 'Ciao America', Derneburg, 30 January 1990, reproduced in Recent Paintings by Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London 1990, p. 5).
In Ciao America II numerous birds are also present, seemingly emerging from and merging into a grid-like blue background. Painted throughout in broad clumsy strokes of kindergarten colour, the painting is a tightly controlled mess of form. The visual procession of all these dumb-looking upside-down birds becomes an absurd parade that seems to throw the same strange and perhaps unanswerable questions at the viewer as Baselitz himself posed in the text he wrote to accompany the paintings when they were exhibited at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in April 1990. 'How good, really, is one's adhesion to the ground?' Baselitz asked, 'To stand, to fall, to fly. What comes hard, (is) to get behind the mystery of pictures, whether by sympathy, by reflection, or by analysis ... Ciao is one formula...you say it when you come, you say it when you go. There's something coming from America. What?... Beyond the hundredth meridian it disperses; on this side it rises up as smoke, dancing smoke. The smoke forms into pictures above the roof. I thought to myself, here as there, someone is sitting in a room and doing it, tapping the key, transmitting: yellow, red, red, blue, black, dash, dot, dash' (Georg Baselitz in 'Ciao America', Derneburg, 30 January 1990, reproduced in Recent Paintings by Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London 1990, p. 5).