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January 21 – April 29, 2018

Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) is one of the foremost artists of our time. To mark his eightieth birthday, the Fondation Beyeler will be showing an extensive selection of his work as a painter, sculptor and printmaker. The exhibition, organized in close cooperation with the artist, takes the form of a focused retrospective, bringing together many of the most important paintings and sculptures created by Baselitz over the past six decades. These powerful and exciting works, from every phase of the artist's career, reveal the astonishing range of his creative imagination.

Baselitz is one of the few contemporary artists whose work is deeply rooted in the history of European and American painting. He is seen as the inventor of a figurative pictorial language that draws on a rich repertoire of iconographic and stylistic elements, although these, in his visual inventions, take on conflicting and ambivalent meanings. Baselitz’s artistic cosmos is like a hall of mirrors in which original, remembered and imagined images blend with art-historical models and precedents to form new and striking compositions. The powerful and exciting works in the exhibition, from every phase of the artist's career, reveal the full thematic and stylistic range of his exceptional oeuvre. Key works from the 1960s, with a selection of the Hero and Fracture paintings, will feature in the exhibition, together with examples of the inverted images for which Baselitz became famous in the 1970s and 80s. A selection of the artist's large-format wood sculptures will include his first exercise in this medium: the painted wood piece that caused a political scandal when it was exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Paintings from the later Remix series and from recent years complete the survey of the work of one of the most original artists of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. The retrospective assembles some eighty paintings and ten sculptures from 1959 to the present day, with loans from renowned public and private collections in Europe and the USA.

The exhibition has been organized in cooperation with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, where it will be shown subsequently in a modified form. In parallel with the presentation at the Fondation Beyeler, the Kunstmuseum Basel will be exhibiting a selection of Baselitz's works on paper.

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Biography

Born January 23, 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, in Saxony, Germany, and given the name Hans-Georg Bruno Kern.

The exhibition «Georg Baselitz» is being supported by:

 

Beyeler-Stiftung

 

Hansjörg Wyss,
Wyss Foundation

 

Prof. Dr. Dr. Herbert Batliner