Hommage à Georg Baselitz

"I am completely unreasonable"

This quote is the title of an interview with Georg Baselitz in the 18 January 2018 edition of DIE ZEIT, which states in the introduction that the painter, who celebrates his 80th birthday on 23 January 2018, shows understanding for Trump and the AfD. Anyone who reads the interview carefully will be surprised by this somewhat clumsy showmanship. It also doesn't quite fit in with the film documentaries and features that have been shown on TV in recent days, where a humorous, clever and fascinating man approaches the audience. He almost gleefully describes himself as "insanely sentimental" when it comes to his own - old - works, and as very nervous on the evening of an opening when he shows his new works. So Siegfried Gohr's carefully formulated "Homage à Georg Baselitz", which analyses the work and career of its creator, comes just in time for a captivating exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. Gohr's text provides a coherent outline, highlighting the art-historically significant achievements of an artist who has not only been repeatedly characterised as one of the great German artists, but who has also recently been recognised as having great contemporary relevance in view of the works from his Remix phase. Siegfried Gohr elegantly demonstrates this in his text, in which an old leather armchair plays just as much a role as Baselitz's self-chosen outsider status and his constantly new, often almost revolutionary pictorial inventions.

Exhibition:
CFA Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 23/1 - 3/3/2018