Downward looking: Two new exhibitions celebrate the dissenting, authentic work of Georg Baselitz, past and present
Two new exhibitions celebrating Nicole Brachetti Peretti Collection contributor, Georg Baselitz’s insurgent genius took place in London in late 2020, one at White Cube Mason’s Yard (Darkness Goldness, 4th September - 11th November), and the other at Michael Werner Gallery (Georg Baselitz: I Was Born into a Destroyed Order, 11th September - 24th October).
The exhibitions dedicated to Baselitz’s work this year run parallel to one another with regards to their content. Michael Werner Gallery’s tribute casts back to his artistic routes and revisits questions about the art humans create if they are born into political and social turmoil. On the other hand, the White Cube presents a highly modern, almost unrecognisable version of the artist, perhaps only distinguishable by a revised, contemporary take on Baselitz’s historic metacarpal theme.
Baselitz’s life began under the Nazi regime in 1938. He claims to feel as though he was “born into a destroyed order,” one of his better-known aphorisms which has since informed Michael Werner Gallery’s naming of its recent exhibition. I Was Born into a Destroyed Order presents a blossoming of Baselitz’s work from the 1960s onwards, tracking the first 30 years of the artist’s life through his creative proliferation. The curation of milestone paintings across Baselitz’s early career comprise sculpture and works on paper.
The exhibition can be read as a reminder of the power of art as a political tool, for good and for evil. Baselitz’s earlier work is bound up in mid-Century reckonings with the kind of art one should, or more significantly, should not, create. Nazism and Stalinism shared a common ground in their aesthetic rigidities: figurative work of clarity and conformity. The Third Reich hosted a ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition of Modernist work in 1937, just a year before Baselitz’s birth, and, just 5 years before that, Socialist Realism become the official art of the Soviet Union.
It is clear to see that Baselitz’s art is founded on aesthetic rebellion. So affected as he was by the disordered political landscape of his youth, the artist has strived to make art that reflects the violence and bloodshed while refuting the aesthetic limitations of the political leaders of the time. While acknowledging the horrors of the past, Baselitz frees himself from the dictatorial grip of those regimes that sought to supress individual freedoms by painting lolling, formless, subversively Mannerist figures. What they lack of the clipped beauty of Soviet social realism or the clarity of line in the artworks of Nazi plunder, they make up for in authenticity, intelligence and comically enlarged hands.
Looking forward to the present day and the current artistic output of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists, White Cube brings the Baselitz’ own hands to the fore via the medium of monotype printing (as well as through sculpture, including fire-gilded bronze bas-relief hands that hang on the wall). The abstract works engolden the hands of the artist (in both a specific and wider-reaching sense), and, according to White Cube, present the hands as “vital sense organs… the primary means with which we connect with the world.”
And this rings true for Baselitz, who claims his artistic orientation has always been “downward looking and tactile.” This extends beyond the visual representation of hands and tactility in his work from the 1960s to the present day. To be “downward looking” could be understood as depressive or disregarding, but in Baselitz’s case, it is a call to pragmatism. To look down, at the hands, at the world, is to see them or it for what really is. Casting your eyes down is a rejection of dogma and ideology. It is to focus on individuality, freedom and capacity for creation in the face of oppression.