GEORG BASELITZ: A CONFESSION OF MY SINS
White Cube announces A Confession of My Sins by the artist Georg Baselitz. From the vantage point of old age, Baselitz reflects upon a lifetime of lived experience and artistic invention, paying homage to key inspirations, motifs and subject matter, as well as unearthing pictorial references from his youth.
April 10 – June 16, 2024
Appealing to this rich panoply of personal iconography, in several works the artist uses himself and his wife as a subject for exploration – an approach that has become focal to his recent paintings. Der Maler in seinem Bett usw. (The Painter in His Bed, etc.) (2023), presented in the 9x9x9 gallery alongside a selection of works on paper, depicts the painter and Elke Baselitz in a soft, spectral palette of whites. The two figures, seated and starkly rendered, are set against an enveloping darkness, recalling James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871).
As the artist muses, the drawings that serve as a counterpart for the exhibited paintings figure like ‘a dam between two ponds’, a metaphor that evokes the landscape of his childhood around Deutschbaselitz, a village in Saxony nestled between forests and lakes. Baselitz returns to this provincial imagery, depicting animals indigenous to the area like those in Blaue Augen Rehe (Blue Eyes Deer) (2023), which recalls the animal studies of German Expressionist Franz Marc.
After witnessing the MoMA’s landmark travelling exhibition, ‘The New American Painting’, in West Berlin in 1958 – a survey which toured eight European capitals and exposed the art scene to the origins and breadth of American Abstract Expressionism – Baselitz sought to emulate Willem de Kooning’s fluid handling of paint. References to de Kooning have remained a constant in Baselitz’s practice, including his 2014 exhibition titled ‘Willem raucht nicht mehr’ (‘Farewell Bill’). As Baselitz has stated, ‘most of what you see as freedom is de Kooning.’
Baselitz’s fascination with Artaud proved to be formative. Eager to disrupt the complacency of post-war Germany, Baselitz and his comrade Eugen Schönebeck drew up the Pandämonische Manifeste (Pandemonic Manifestoes) (1961–62) – a phantasmagorical yet polemical artists’ statement combining text and drawing, for which Artaud and his radical aesthetics of crisis served as a crucial touchstone.
A personal confrontation with crisis compels Baselitz and the work he creates, in which abstraction also serves as an abolition of the image. ‘I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society,’ he says, describing post-war Germany.
This observation proves remarkably prescient in this latest body of work, where a distinctly unifying element emerges in the angular markings embedded within many of the paintings. Baselitz, who has long painted his canvases on the floor, left behind these striations as his walking frame and the trolley holding his utensils facilitated his movements across their surfaces. These imprints now serve as a temporal record of the artist’s passage, both literally and metaphorically marking the passage of time.