Hommage à Georg Baselitz

“I am completely unreasonable”, with this quote the ZEIT of 18 January 2018 headlined its interview with Georg Baselitz, writing in the introduction that the painter, who was celebrating his eightieth birthday on 23 January 2018, shows sympathy for Trump and the AfD. Anyone who reads the interview closely will be surprised at this rather clumsy sensationalism. Nor does it quite square with the film documentaries and features shown on television in recent days, in which a humorous, astute and fascinating man steps towards the viewer. Almost with relish he describes himself as “insanely sentimental” where his own – older – works are concerned, and as very nervous on the evening of an opening, when he shows his new ones. Siegfried Gohr’s careful “Hommage à Georg Baselitz,” formulated analytically along the lines of the work and the career of its creator, therefore comes at exactly the right moment; it appears to accompany a captivating exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. Gohr’s text provides a coherent survey and highlights the art-historically significant achievements of an artist who has not only repeatedly been characterised as one of the great German artists, but who, in view of the works of his Remix phase, has recently once again been credited with great contemporary relevance. Siegfried Gohr elegantly brings this home to us in his text, in which an old leather armchair plays as much of a part as Baselitz’s self-chosen outsider status and his ever-new, often downright revolutionary pictorial inventions.

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