Created in the artist’s studio north of Salzburg, this new series of paintings and ink drawings features eagles, a motif that has resurfaced in Georg Baselitz’s oeuvre throughout his life. Depicted in tactile, multicoloured impasto, the works feature eagles rendered in gestural strokes, larger than life, hovering in an undefined space. Seemingly weightless, they appear to float against varying backgrounds of blue, in hues reminiscent of works by Lucas Cranach the Elder or ‘the beach paintings that Picasso created in Dinard, in Brittany, in the 1920s’ as Andreas Zimmermann, curator of the celebrated exhibition Georg Baselitz: Naked Masters (2023) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, writes in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. The eagles are perched or in flight, conveying a sense of the vigour with which they were painted. Baselitz uses spatulas rather than paint brushes, producing marks that recall ‘middle and late period Rembrandt and, even more so, pen and ink drawings by Hokusai. […] Filigree and powerful at once: a typical Baselitz paradox.’

In two paintings, Baselitz depicts birds against a lighter, slate blue backdrop, grounded by a web of colour streaks that stretches across the canvas in zigzag lines. The eagles in these works prominently feature applications of cut-out plastic circles as eyes – a method that Baselitz has only recently adopted and which was inspired by Hannah Höch’s collages.