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12/2/2007

Georg Baselitz

Contemporary Fine Arts (old location), Berlin

The Bridge Ghost's Supper

Remix in Berlin

Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to announce the solo show “The Bridge Ghost’s Supper” by Georg Baselitz. The exhibition will centre around the new, large work Nachtessen in Dresden (Remix). It is a remix of Baselitz’s famous work of the same title from 1983. 38 ink drawings that vary the motif of the painting in portraits and detailed views complement the show.

Baselitz has been working on the new work group of the remixes, which was shown for the first time in the comprehensive museum show “Baselitz Remix” at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne. The remix works are new versions of those paintings that are considered seminal for his artistic identity and that stand for his international recognition – like Nachtessen in Dresden from 1983, which by now is part of the permanent collection of Kunsthaus Zurich.

In the new version of the painting, three male figures in dark suits with four charismatic heads shine before a black background. The scene is – as has been typical for Baselitz since 1969 – upside down. The four people are portraits of icons of (German) expressionism: in the middle the ageing Edvard Munch, framed by the three Brücke artists Kirchner, Schmidt-Rotluff, and Heckel. They are the same protagonists Baselitz had shown in the original Nachtessen in Dresden of 1983.

But whereas the colour and formal vocabulary of the original work played with that of German expressionism and the pasty paint application typical of, for example, Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde, the current remix work is a contemporary realization of the motif. The painting style of the remix works has gained more of the quality of a drawing – a characteristic which Baselitz has been refining since the mid 1990s. In Nachtessen in Dresden (Remix), the oil paint is shiny, applied onto the canvas with masterly, quick brushstrokes.

And even more has changed: in the composition of the remix, the table at which the figures are sitting in the 1983 version and which made the setting reminiscent of the Last Supper, is missing. In the new version, the shoes are visible: black cowboy boots that make one think of Karl May’s stories set in the Wild West. Enlarged versions of them are, together with portraits, the subject of the 38 ink drawings. But what do Karl May cowboy boots and Brücke artists have in common? Like Baselitz himself, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rotluff, Heckel, and Karl May were either Saxons or, like the Brücke artists, lived in Saxony for a long time.

Baselitz, always looking for what is ‘German’ in art, in his most recent works continues to juggle with art historical and simultaneously biographical references – at this point with a charming ease and nonchalance.

Contemporary Fine Arts
Sophienstrasse 21 Berlin
Opening hours: Tue - Fri 10 - 18 and 2 - 6; Sat 11 - 5
Admission free

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