Georg Baselitz — works on paper — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 20, 2021 → January 15, 2022

Galerie Catherine Putman is very pleased to show a new exhibition of works on paper by Georg Baselitz.

Georg Baselitz has a place of honour in Paris this autumn with a very large retrospective at the Centre Pompidou covering 60 years of his work: paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints.

Engraving has always had a fundamental position in his art. When he addresses a new subject he works in series and makes simultaneous use of all techniques, considering that they enrich each other mutually.

In 2019, Georg Baselitz began a new body of work on the theme of hands. Ein Hand ist Keine faust (‘A hand is not a fist’) shown in the exhibition: the twelve engravings made using acid, aquatint or drypoint form a series of variations of the positions and colours of his own hand. Other prints from a series entitled Mano, made in the same year in aquatint only, are like imprints, with more abstract and more pictorial traces. There are two versions of these Mano — one gold and one silver. In the engraving process, Baselitz sees the possibility of handling a subject using variation. He is interested in form, a modelled object above all.

The subject of the body—a major theme in western art —is strongly present in his works: naked bodies, portraits or self-portraits, and also isolated members: feet, hands, legs, sexes, etc. He seeks to upset the established order, to shock, to draw reactions and to go forwards. From the first works like _Die große Nacht im Eimer _(‘Big Night Down the Drain’) that caused a scandal when it was exhibited in Berlin in 1963, he painted the prominent penis of a hideous person. In 2008, this painting was revisited by a series of Big Night (remix) works.
The exhibition includes several examples with a watercolour and wood engravings.

Georg Baselitz often shows bodies upside down or dismembered and he sometimes depicts only one part, as in the large watercolour Sans titre. 25.VIII.2004 shown in the gallery.
The body is handled like the ‘fractured compositions’ of the 1960s that are imbalanced and display disjointed members.

In other works, members have become ‘fragments’ considered as autonomous formal objects. This started in 1961 with the series P.D. Fuße (P.D. Feet).

Finally comes the naked body, female or male, his own, ageing and represented with no concessions. The inversion of the figure that has been almost systematic since 1969 also
allows him to keep a distance from the body and depict members that are like entire
elements floating in space.

Born in Deutschbaselitz in Saxony (former RDA), in 1938.
Lives and works in Munich.

From the very beginning, his work expresses reactions on traumas and tragedies closely linked with the history of Germany.

Since the 1960s, the works of Baselitz have been a subject of numerous individual and collective international exhibitions. Georg Baselitz represents Germany in 1980 at the Venise Biennial, is present at documenta 5,6,7, in 1972,1977 and 1982 in Kassel.
The Museum Solomon R Guggenheim in New York presents the first retrospective of engravings in 1995, exhibited afterwards at Angeles County Museum, at Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., at Nationalgalerie in Berlin and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The Royal Academy of Art in London organises another significant retrospective in 2007. From September 2011 until June 2012, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris displays a retrospective of his sculptured work, followed in 2013 by a vast retrospective at the occasion of the 75th birthday of the artist, at the Essl Museum in Vienna.
In 2015, Georg Baselitz participated in the exhibition All The World’s Futures at the Arsenale during the 56th Venice Biennale.

Georg Baselitz has a place of honour in Paris this autumn with a very large retrospective at the Centre Pompidou covering 60 years of his work: paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints.

Painter, sculptor and engraver. Georg Baselitz is today considered one of the most talented engravers of his generation. The Galerie Catherine Putman edits his works in France since 1997.

« I do paintings and engravings in parallel, without giving them different values because they are just two simultanous activities. What I do in my paintings exists in my engravings, it depends on them. »
Georg Baselitz, in Grabados Gravures Prints 1964-1990, Cabinet des estampes, Genève — Ivam, Valence — Tate Gallery, Londres, 1991.