“If you’re remixing popular music you change the rhythm or the sound-What I do is something entirely different. I have thought for a long time about what to call what I do. I liked the word ‘remix’ because it comes from youth culture.

What I could never escape was Germany, and being German.”

GEORG BASELITZ, Auftritt am Sandtreich II - bei + 30 C (Remix), 2006
Oil on canvas

Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most prolific and well-known living artists. Born in Saxony in 1938 - painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. Selecting subject matter (figures, animals, birds, landscapes and still-lifes) and placing them in dramatic settings, Baselitz’ works also place the viewer in a world of heightened self-consciousness to confront the being with the brutalities of history and the human tragedies.

He also partakes of a particular rebel sensibility and - like Camus Homme révolté - examines several countercultural figures and movements to cast anti-heroes as a strategy to liberate the subject matter, from the grotesque one, to the broken soldiers of the Fracture paintings and the inverted figures of the disturbing upside-down paintings.

Baselitz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal. Two of the pictures, “The Big Night Down The Drain”/ “Die große Nacht im Eimer” (1962/63) and the “Naked Man”/ “Nackter Mann” (1962), are seized by the public prosecutor. The ensuing court case does not end until 1965. Again in 1980, at the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he caused a stir with a monumental carved wooden figure, which appeared to making a Hitlerian salute. as well as the sixteenth century German woodcuts and African sculptures.

Georg Baselitz photographed by Lothar Wolleh, Mülheim, 1971

Remix Paintings is title of the exhibition of recent paintings by Georg Baselitz at Gagosian Gallery - New York
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In the recent Remix Paintings, Baselitz has revisited the most provocative aspects of his own history, such as Die grosse Nacht im Einer and Die grossen Freunde, and made new versions or interpretations of them, with the experience of hindsight. Enlarged and rapidly painted with swathes of bright, transparent hue across white canvas and explosive, meandering lines, the Remix paintings are radical transubstantiations - part-caricature, part-ghost– of their muted, more ponderous predecessors. The spontaneity with which they are executed gives rise to mnemonic flashes of things in the past, present, and future. The references to Hitler, once ambiguous, are now clearly articulated. The impulse to improve, clarify, and update is clearly evident, but the haunting, fleeting quality of the Remix work has also to do with a mature artist’s meditations on time, presence, failure and possibility.

Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street - New York

Opening reception for the artist: Friday, November 9th, from 6 to 8 pm

Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street - New York