Georg Baselitz — Druckgraphik — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 9 days: September 13 → October 25, 2025

The gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of prints by Georg Baselitz.

A major figure of German contemporary art, to whom the Centre Pompidou devoted a major retrospective in 2021–2022, Georg Baselitz is a painter, sculptor and printmaker.

The artist does not practice printmaking as an art of reproduction and if he uses some of the subjects in his prints that he also broaches in painting and sculpture, it is due to the inherent virtues this technique can provide him with.

The catalogue raisonné of the printed corpus, (1) currently under production and published up to volume IV, so far stops at 1992, which shows the degree of importance of this technique within his overall oeuvre. Its title Georg Baselitz Peintre-Graveur [Georg Baselitz: Painter-Printmaker] provides us with one of the keys to his approach, that of a painter’s printmaking style. Practised consistently since the early 1960s, the artist, aged nearly ninety, continues to work regularly on copper plates in the area of his studio reserved for printmaking.

“You can be sure that a line scratched into a material that resists has a more definitive character than the line of a drawing. When conserving prints, you realise that any of them, irrespective of its age, presents more fresh immediacy in its state of conservation than a drawing by the same artist. That is what drew me to printmaking, which I have never seen as reproduction, as the multiplication of a sketch. For me, through a complementary analysis related to the technique of engraving, it was always about emphasising or clarifying a form developed in drawing or painting, almost a schema . . . but that has an autonomous artistic ambition.” (2)

The exhibition will bring together works from the early 1990s up until the most recent editions, which deal with animals and the human body, across all periods of his work. The first room will present animal engravings — dog, horse, deer, eagle — and the second features human bodies, a self-portrait, a portrait of his wife Elke or fragments (feet and hands).

In the tradition of German hunting painting or the immutable Western art tradition of self-portraiture, the artist has long appropriated classical subjects whose figurative treatment is often challenged by the subversion of the motif and an expressive and transgressive stroke.

(1) Georg Baselitz interviewed by Rainer Michael Mason in Georg Baselitz Gravures, exhibition catalogue of the Cabinet des Estampes de Genève, (1991)
(2) Rainer Michael Mason and Detlev Gretenkort (eds.), Georg Baselitz Peintre — Graveur IV (Snoeck, 2024).