Michael Werner Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Georg Baselitz (German, b. 1938).
Georg Baselitz continues to explore the motifs that have been important personal icons throughout his career, namely the eagle and the Saxonian landscape. In this group of recent paintings, all of which were created in 2000, Georg Baselitz expands the expressive range of these recurring motifs by painting them into an invented world of imagined encounters, childhood memories, and art historical references including Klee, Kirchner and Sienese painting. All of the works in the exhibition have direct sources in paintings the artist made as a teenager during the 1950s, and in fact certain works bear the dates '1953', '1954' or '1955' as part of their iconography. This combination of personal history and historical sources amounts to what Richard Shiff calls a 'reconfigured autobiography'
The ten paintings presented at Michael Werner show Georg Baselitz's new engagement with the materials and methods of painting. The works have an unexpected lightness of touch and a surprisingly delicate palette, evoking the quality of watercolor and further enhancing their unusual beauty and depth of feeling.
Major exhibitions of Georg Baselitz include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh; Kunstmuseum Basel; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth, Texas; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia. Georg Baselitz lives and works in Derneberg, Germany and Imperia, Italy.
This exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue featuring an essay by Dr. Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas, Austin.
Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10am until 6pm. Please contact the gallery for more information.