Waking into Georg Baselitz collection is purely a coincident today. Friends around me keep nagging me of taking a restful holiday to be away from the busy life. Oh, yeah, yeah, my yes answer seems too fragile to be denied at any single minute. I know there are still multi domestic duties requiring my attention to fulfil. After alternation of my original plan to embark on an essay writing, which is an unthoughtful promise to a professor in China and rather a dull job to be honest, I have then decided to take mom and Rebecca to visit Royal Academy of Arts- Antiquaries in Britain (1707-2007). I was hoping this might be an inspirational event for Rebecca heeding her interests in arts and contribute to mom’s understanding towards Britain. When we arrived in the Royal Academy of Arts, our attention had been drawn in by a single armed wooden sculpture by Georg Baselitz.
Georg Baselitz is a famous German artist. The collection covers his 50 years’ work. I gathered some of his background from the audio guide. Being a lay person, personally what striking me the most is that his work completely depicts the subject matter upside down. My favorite one is his early pieces of painting the wounded, diseased legs. He had been criticized of de-forming. However, his work is an inventing rather than a still live painting, as he defended for himself. His work entangled the historic, aesthetic and ideological elements. The Poet is the piece reflecting all the three tri-logy. I also like the colour he played, using mixed red and blue to set up a confused background color as well as big contracts color – red and green being applied. The three parts of distortion and 180 degree of turn around appeared as a strong feature. Abstract projected and represented the disorder of the thoughts and also finding a passage to yell out the depressed emotions.
The first one brought him to the pubic is his early work which was painted in 1962/1963- Die große Nacht im Eimer (”The Big Night Down The Drain”) (oil on canvas, 250 x 180 cm), which caused police action accusing him of under aged sex stimulating. I like his way to capture the morbid physiological tragic and reveal the consequence of suffering of human living after the war, the lost and being repressed.
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His works intrigued my interests in exploring more about his work during that period, in particularly to explore more of his work brought me invisible to visible, express inexpressible expressible.
He was bron in 1938 Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a small village near Dresden, he enrolled in the Academy of Visual and Applied Arts in East Berlin in 1956. After two semesters he was suspended for “social and political immaturity.” Subsequently, he moved to West Berlin and changed his name to Georg Baselitz. There he studied the work of the surrealists, dadaists, and other European modernists, but it was his exposure to the work of the American abstract expressionists that was to have the most profound influence on the development of his work. (sources:
Since 1969, the paintings of German artist Georg Baselitz have been immediately recognizable to anyone even vaguely familiar with his work because the subject matter is depicted upside-down. While, the “upside-down-ness” of Baselitz’s work is the most obvious and provocative feature of his paintings, it is, in the end, an artistic challenge that the artist sets for himself. By doing so, he deftly combines the worlds of abstraction and representation.
This painting is one of the many portraits he has made of his wife, Elke Kretzschmar, over the past thirty years. In these portraits, Baselitz challenges himself to deny and suppress his emotions about his model to focus instead on conveying pure visual structure in paint. It was this desire to use traditional and recognizable subject matter to explore painterly abstraction that led Baselitz to paint his subjects upside-down. As he explained it. “That is the best way to liberate representation from content.”
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects
Posted on October 21st, 2007 by wendywu
Filed under: Culture and Arts
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