Lot No. 618


Georg Baselitz *


(born in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony in 1938)
Hinterglas, 1997, titled, signed and dated on the reverse G. Baselitz 19. VIII. 97, inscribed with “Privat” and directional indication, oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm, framed, (AR)

We are grateful to Mr Detlev Gretenkort of the Georg Baselitz Archive for his kind assistance in the cataloguing of this work. The present work is registered in the Georg Baselitz Archive under the archive no. GB/M 1997.08.19

Provenance:
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Imperia, Villa Faravelli, Georg Baselitz e Benjamin Katz, Attori a rovescio, 22 May – 10 September 2005, exh. cat. pp. 30–31 with ill.
Lugano, Georg Baselitz, Museo d’Arte Moderna, 6 May – 23 September 2007 (label on the reverse), exh. cat. p. 95 with ill.

Art is visceral and vulgar - it‘s an eruption.
(Georg Baselitz)

After spending about three years on oil paintings intended to destructure the organicity of the figure and shatter its integrity, in 1969 Georg Baselitz decided to turn the painted subject upside-down. This gesture is one of those that have an indelible impact not only on the life of the painter but also on the history of art.
In Western culture, but also in the rest of the world, especially in the conception distinguishing all figurative activity, the image has always been conventionally presented by orienting the subject on the surface of the support in accordance with the coordinates of top and bottom with respect to the anthropological view point.
The subversive event of the inversion of the image involved an emotional charge of a very different nature from the one that has previously distinguished Baselitz’s pictorial work. An unprecedented firmness can be perceived in those new works as well as a simultaneously calm and abnormal enunciative approach typical of someone who has made a real leap forward and entered a different expressive dimension.
Baselitz must have undergone a crucial awakening for an artist long in search of a way out of the impasse of the figurative painting that had exhausted every possibility of redeeming the figure in the post-war period after Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning.
Baselitz’s approach is , however, neither an upside-down perspective nor a bizarre opening nor indeed a “bottom-up“ vision […], but rather a conceptual inversion deriving from the branching out of new spatiality that, from Pollock to Lucio Fontana, had led the young Baselitz to assume that the breakthrough to be achieved in painting could only be of mental and ideological nature. […]
In both the sculpture and the painting produced since the fateful year of 1969, Baselitz has never ceased to expose his vocabulary to new processes of elaboration. The most recent cycles of his work thus continue to offer unprecedented modalities that shoulder the task of visually displaying requirements of which Baselitz has since become aware. After 1995 his painting underwent an invasion of both pictorial modes and iconographic programmes generated by memories of his personal history as well as his family circle and friends.
[…] Baselitz’s imagination explodes on the canvas in an unstoppable flood. […] it is obvious that the images flow into the mind of the painter who pins them down, annotates them, photographs them with the naked eye or, if you prefer, with a mind free of all preoccupations and pours them out instantaneously onto the canvases at a speed enhanced by the use of highly diluted paint.
[…] What distinguishes the painting of the last few years is also the extraordinary freedom of the artist, now fully aware of his expressive means and hence even more uninhibited.
[…] In the acrobatic crescendo of modal interactions developed in various other works, it can be stated that Baselitz has broken new ground in the process of deconstruction of the image and the painting itself by stripping them of plasticity and working on the pictorial fabric to make it as light and transparent as the ethereal consistency of the images that form in the state between sleep and wakefulness.

Bruno Corà, Georg Baselitz: Backward, Forward, Upside Down, Everywhere, in the Painting
(in “Georg Baselitz“, edited by Rainer Michael Mason, catalogue of the exhibition held at Museo d’Arte Moderna, Lugano, 6 May – 23 September 2007)

01.06.2016 - 19:00

Realized price: **
EUR 259,200.-
Estimate:
EUR 180,000.- to EUR 260,000.-

Georg Baselitz *


(born in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony in 1938)
Hinterglas, 1997, titled, signed and dated on the reverse G. Baselitz 19. VIII. 97, inscribed with “Privat” and directional indication, oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm, framed, (AR)

We are grateful to Mr Detlev Gretenkort of the Georg Baselitz Archive for his kind assistance in the cataloguing of this work. The present work is registered in the Georg Baselitz Archive under the archive no. GB/M 1997.08.19

Provenance:
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Imperia, Villa Faravelli, Georg Baselitz e Benjamin Katz, Attori a rovescio, 22 May – 10 September 2005, exh. cat. pp. 30–31 with ill.
Lugano, Georg Baselitz, Museo d’Arte Moderna, 6 May – 23 September 2007 (label on the reverse), exh. cat. p. 95 with ill.

Art is visceral and vulgar - it‘s an eruption.
(Georg Baselitz)

After spending about three years on oil paintings intended to destructure the organicity of the figure and shatter its integrity, in 1969 Georg Baselitz decided to turn the painted subject upside-down. This gesture is one of those that have an indelible impact not only on the life of the painter but also on the history of art.
In Western culture, but also in the rest of the world, especially in the conception distinguishing all figurative activity, the image has always been conventionally presented by orienting the subject on the surface of the support in accordance with the coordinates of top and bottom with respect to the anthropological view point.
The subversive event of the inversion of the image involved an emotional charge of a very different nature from the one that has previously distinguished Baselitz’s pictorial work. An unprecedented firmness can be perceived in those new works as well as a simultaneously calm and abnormal enunciative approach typical of someone who has made a real leap forward and entered a different expressive dimension.
Baselitz must have undergone a crucial awakening for an artist long in search of a way out of the impasse of the figurative painting that had exhausted every possibility of redeeming the figure in the post-war period after Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning.
Baselitz’s approach is , however, neither an upside-down perspective nor a bizarre opening nor indeed a “bottom-up“ vision […], but rather a conceptual inversion deriving from the branching out of new spatiality that, from Pollock to Lucio Fontana, had led the young Baselitz to assume that the breakthrough to be achieved in painting could only be of mental and ideological nature. […]
In both the sculpture and the painting produced since the fateful year of 1969, Baselitz has never ceased to expose his vocabulary to new processes of elaboration. The most recent cycles of his work thus continue to offer unprecedented modalities that shoulder the task of visually displaying requirements of which Baselitz has since become aware. After 1995 his painting underwent an invasion of both pictorial modes and iconographic programmes generated by memories of his personal history as well as his family circle and friends.
[…] Baselitz’s imagination explodes on the canvas in an unstoppable flood. […] it is obvious that the images flow into the mind of the painter who pins them down, annotates them, photographs them with the naked eye or, if you prefer, with a mind free of all preoccupations and pours them out instantaneously onto the canvases at a speed enhanced by the use of highly diluted paint.
[…] What distinguishes the painting of the last few years is also the extraordinary freedom of the artist, now fully aware of his expressive means and hence even more uninhibited.
[…] In the acrobatic crescendo of modal interactions developed in various other works, it can be stated that Baselitz has broken new ground in the process of deconstruction of the image and the painting itself by stripping them of plasticity and working on the pictorial fabric to make it as light and transparent as the ethereal consistency of the images that form in the state between sleep and wakefulness.

Bruno Corà, Georg Baselitz: Backward, Forward, Upside Down, Everywhere, in the Painting
(in “Georg Baselitz“, edited by Rainer Michael Mason, catalogue of the exhibition held at Museo d’Arte Moderna, Lugano, 6 May – 23 September 2007)


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Auction: Contemporary Art - Part I
Auction type: Saleroom auction
Date: 01.06.2016 - 19:00
Location: Vienna | Palais Dorotheum
Exhibition: 21.05. - 01.06.2016


** Purchase price incl. charges and taxes

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