Georg Baselitz 'Die Welt' - Watercolours
Drawing Cabinet
April 14 - June 18, 2011
We are pleased to announce the exhibition of a new
series of watercolours by german artist Georg Baselitz
in our Drawing Cabinet. To mark the 20th anniversary of
German reunification, the Axel Springer publishing
company invited Baselitz to fill the entire edition of the
newspaper Die Welt with his works. On 1 October 2010
there appeared, in place of illustrations, a series of
pictures by Baselitz on the theme of German
reunification.
For Georg Baselitz, who grew up in East Germany and
went over to the "free" West to study painting, the fall of
the Wall and the reunification of Germany constituted
was a dramatic turning-point which found expression in
his art. He felt his collaboration with Axel Springer as a
new opportunity to position his art on this theme in a
medium unfamiliar to him, and to confront readers with
his works. "I find it extremely perplexing, amusing and
positive, that the whole format of a newspaper should
be turned upside-down to make room for a picture
completely detached from the story." Asked whether his
works comment on the content of the article, he said:
"I'm an artist, not an illustrator. I don't comment on the story – I'm part of it."
With this series, Baselitz broke away completely and strikingly from traditional watercolour technique,
with fine graphic lines and rough splashes of colour and black paint running down the pictures like a
dark curtain, symbolising the flow of time or perhaps general instability. The explosive style of his
"typical German art" always represents brutality in history; this makes it appropriate for the theme of
the fall of the Wall.
Georg Baselitz, born as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz (Saxony) in 1938, is indisputably one of
the most important artists of our time. From 1956 he studied painting in East Berlin, and left the GDR
in 1958 to make a career as an internationally recognised artist and sculptor. He represented
Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale, and his works were shown at the documenta in Kassel in 1972,
1977 and 1982. In 1995, the Guggenheim Museum in New York held a comprehensive retrospective
of his work, later shown in the Los Angeles County Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington
DC, the Nationalgalerie Berlin and the Musée dʼArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris. There followed
exhibitions in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2006), the Albertina, Vienna (2007) and the
Staatlichen Kunsthalle, Dresden (2009).
For details please contact:
Mag. Isabella Herzig +43 662 881 393 21 or isabella.herzig@ropac
